Bruce, F. F. The English Bible: A History of Translations from the Earliest English Versions to the New English Bible, pp. 24-126. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

[In the following excerpt from a work that was originally published in 1961, Bruce traces the history of the English Bible from William Tyndale's translation to the Authorized Version, including translations prepared for English Catholics.]

THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT IN PRINT

THE PRINTING PRESS

The three quarters of a century from 1450 to 1525 were momentous years in the history of Europe. Mid-century witnessed the invention of printing—an invention which seems so simple to us who are acquainted with it that it may seem surprising that no one had thought of it before, or at any rate had thought of it as a means for multiplying the output of books. Few inventions, apart from the invention of writing itself, have had such far-reaching implications for human life and culture. Henceforth, where formerly each individual copy of any work had to be laboriously transcribed by hand, hundreds or even thousands of identical copies could be produced at one printing. The credit for the discovery goes to Johann Gutenberg of Mainz in the Rhineland. The first dated printed work is a Latin Psalter of the year 1454; the first major work to emerge from the press was the Latin Bible of 1456—commonly called the Mazarin Bible, because of the interest excited by a copy of it belonging to the great library of the seventeenth-century French statesman Cardinal Jules Mazarin, but more justly known as the Gutenberg Bible.

The Pentateuch in Hebrew was printed at Bologna in North Italy in 1482, and the complete Hebrew Bible at Soncino, near Cremona, in 1488. The New Testament was first printed in Greek in 1514 at Alcala in Spain, under the direction of Cardinal Ximenes. This printing formed part of the Complutensian Polyglot (so called from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcala). In this the New Testament appeared with the Greek text and the Latin Vulgate in parallel columns; in the Old Testament section of the work the Latin Vulgate was flanked by the Hebrew and the Septuagint Greek (like our Lord on the cross between the two thieves, commented the editor as though disguising his enthusiasm for the new learning). But while the New Testament part of the enterprise was printed in 1514, it was not published until some years later, when the whole work, running to six volumes, was complete. The first Greek Testament to be published, therefore, was the first edition prepared by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, printed at Basel and published in March 1516. This first edition was followed in rapid succession by others in 1519, 1522, 1527 and 1535. It was one or another of the editions of Erasmus which formed the basis for Luther's German New Testament, first printed in 1522, and for William Tyndale's English New Testament, first printed in 1525.

William Tyndale's translation was the first English New Testament to be printed. Surprise has sometimes been expressed that no attempt had been made to print the earlier English New Testament, the second Wycliffite version, which enjoyed a wide circulation in manuscript throughout the fifteenth century. William Caxton set up his printing-press towards the end of 1476 at the sign of the Red Pale in the Almonry at Westminster (on the site of the modern Tothill Street). The output of his press was voluminous, including a number of his own translations, for he was an able linguist. Among his major editions were the works of Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Had he been minded to print the Bible in Purvey's version, his press was certainly equal to the task, and the work would have been sure of an even readier sale than Chaucer and Malory. But the Constitutions of Oxford were still in force, and it would probably have been difficult to secure episcopal permission for such wholesale production and distribution of the English Bible.

Caxton did, however, print some portions of the biblical text in English in his translation of The Golden Legend. This work, originally compiled in Latin by one Jacobus de Voragine who later became Archbishop of Genoa, consisted mainly of lives of the saints, including the biblical patriarchs and apostles. The biographies of the biblical characters were to a large extent transcripts of the relevant biblical texts, and so Caxton's printing of this work included fairly literal renderings not only of parts of the New Testament but also of most of Genesis and part of Exodus. In 1509 a printed edition of sermons by Bishop John Fisher was prefaced by an English translation of the penitential psalms.

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING

It was a happy coincidence that the discovery and rapid development of printing should have been followed so quickly by the Revival of Learning—or was it altogether a coincidence? Another important event which made its contribution to the Revival of Learning was the Turkish capture in 1453 of Constantinople, which for eleven hundred years and more had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, the centre of Byzantine culture. The fall of the Eastern Empire led many Greek scholars to migrate to the West, together with their manuscripts; thus the study of Greek, and in particular the study of the New Testament in Greek, received a powerful impetus.

So far as the history of the English Bible is concerned, three representatives of the Revival of Learning are specially worthy of mention. Erasmus (1466-1536) and Sir Thomas More (1480-1535) have already been mentioned, but when we think of them we must not forget a man who influenced them both—John Colet (c. 1467-1519), who became Dean of St Paul's in London in 1505 and founded St Paul's School five years later. Colet in 1496 returned from a prolonged continental visit to his own University of Oxford, and there delivered a course of lectures on the Pauline Epistles (primarily the Epistle to the Romans) which made a deep impression on many who heard them. In his principles of biblical interpretation he made a clean break with the methods of the mediaeval scholastics, and expounded the text in accordance with the plain meaning of the words viewed in relation to their historical context. Erasmus spent some time in Oxford in 1499, and met Colet and More. To Colet he owed much of his insight into the true methods of biblical interpretation, as contrasted with the scholastic way.

Erasmus paid a second visit to England in 1506, and a third in 1511. His third visit was his longest; it was spent mainly in Cambridge, where he served both as Professor of Greek and as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. During his years at Cambridge he gave himself especially to the study of Jerome and of the New Testament, and laid the foundations of his edition of the Greek Testament that was to appear very soon afterwards. It has sometimes been suggested that one of his pupils at Cambridge was William Tyndale; unfortunately the evidence is against this. Erasmus left Cambridge in 1514, and Tyndale probably did not arrive there before 1516 at the earliest. But the influence of Erasmus remained even when the man himself had returned to Europe.

LUTHER AND HIS INFLUENCE

In November 1515 Martin Luther, Augustinian monk and Professor of Sacred Theology in the University of Wittenberg, began to expound Paul's Epistle to the Romans to his students. As he prepared his lectures, he came more and more to grasp the crucial character of Paul's teaching about justification by faith. When at last he understood what Paul was getting at, and applied it to himself, then, he says, “I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before ‘the righteousness of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gateway to heaven.” But no greater challenge to Paul's teaching about justification by faith, as understood by Luther, could be conceived than the views of justification in God's sight popularized at that time by Johann Tetzel, commissioner for the collection of money for the indulgences which the Papacy had been issuing since 1506 to defray the expense of building the new St Peter's in Rome. Justification by grace through faith—or justification by the purchase of a papal indulgence? To Luther the issue seemed clearcut, and in October 1517 he nailed to the doors of the castle church in Wittenberg his Ninety-Five Theses—points intended for academic debate, bringing out various corollaries of the New Testament doctrine of justification and exposing the abuses of the indulgence system. Thus: “every Christian who feels true repentance has as of right full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon.”

Luther himself did not foresee what his action would lead to, but in the light of the sequel we look back to that action as the one which more than any other sparked off the Reformation. And the progress of the Reformation in the years that followed is closely bound up with the history of the first printed Bibles in the vernaculars of western Europe, including the first printed Bibles in English. This, then, brings us to William Tyndale, to whom we owe the first printed English Bible.

TYNDALE'S EARLIER YEARS

William Tyndale (who sometimes used the alternative family name of Hutchins) was born in Gloucestershire in 1494 or 1495. He went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford at what would now seem an impossibly tender age, became Bachelor of Arts in 1512 and Master in 1515. Every Master of Arts was required to lecture in the schools for a year after taking his degree, so Tyndale presumably remained at Oxford until 1516 at least. Then he moved to Cambridge—too late, as has been said, to sit at the feet of Erasmus. But Cambridge was then more advanced than Oxford as a home of the new learning; in 1518 Richard Croke, who had spent several years on the Continent and occupied the Chair of Greek at Leipzig, returned to Cambridge and began to give lectures on Greek. Tyndale's competence in the Greek language may well owe much to Croke's lectures at Cambridge.

From Cambridge Tyndale went in 1522 to Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire as tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh, twice high sheriff of the county. While there he translated Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani (“The Christian Soldier's Handbook”), a short treatise on the Christian's spiritual equipment and discipline which the Dutch scholar had written in 1502. This work insists on the duty of studying the New Testament, and making it the court of appeal in questions of life and doctrine. Tyndale's employer and his wife were greatly impressed by reading Tyndale's translation of the little book, but the ecclesiastical authorities of the county were less favourably disposed towards him, the more so as some of them had experienced his powers in debate at his master's dining-table. He was summoned before the Chancellor of Gloucester diocese to answer a charge of heresy, but the charge was not sustained.

Such experiences, however, led Tyndale to the conviction that the root cause of much confusion in people's minds on the matters then under debate was ignorance of the Scripture. If this ignorance could be corrected, the eyes of all would be opened and the truth made clearly known. And the ignorance was not confined to the humbler laity; it was shared by many of the clergy. A first-hand account of Tyndale's career at this time, which John Foxe later incorporated in his Book of Martyrs, reports one conversation which shows the direction of his mind.

Soon after, Master Tyndall happened to be in the company of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him drove him to that issue, that the learned man said: “We were better be without God's law than the Pope's.” Master Tyndall, hearing that, answered him: “I defy the Pope and all his laws”; and said: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

In these words we may certainly recognize an echo of words appearing in Erasmus's preface to his Greek New Testament of 1516:

I totally disagree with those who are unwilling that the Holy Scriptures, translated into the common tongue, should be read by the unlearned. Christ desires His mysteries to be published abroad as widely as possible. I could wish that even all women should read the Gospel and St Paul's Epistles, and I would that they were translated into all the languages of all Christian people, that they might be read and known not merely by the Scots and the Irish but even by the Turks and the Saracens. I wish that the farm worker might sing parts of them at the plough, that the weaver might hum them at the shuttle, and that the traveller might beguile the weariness of the way by reciting them.

Erasmus's desire was shortly to be translated into fact by Tyndale, so far as the needs of the English people were concerned.

NO ROOM IN ENGLAND

Perhaps the knowledge that Luther had given his countrymen the German New Testament in 1522 was a further stimulus to Tyndale to do the like service for his countrymen. But it would not be politic to mention Luther's name in this connection. Luther was disapproved of in the highest quarters in England; in 1521 King Henry VIII had published his Assertion of the Seven Sacraments against Luther, and received thereby from Pope Leo X the title “Defender of the Faith”, which his successors have borne to this day. And the very fact that Luther had issued the New Testament in the vernacular might well arouse suspicion against anyone else who proposed to do the same.

In any case, the Constitutions of Oxford were still in force, and Tyndale could not carry out his heart's desire anywhere in England without episcopal licence. To which bishop should he apply? Cuthbert Tonstall had recently become Bishop of London; he was reputed to be favourably disposed to the new learning; Erasmus spoke well of him. To him, then, Tyndale decided to go. So, taking leave of Sir John Walsh, and bearing a letter of introduction from him to the controller of the king's household, Tyndale went to London in the summer of 1523, and in due course obtained an interview with the bishop.

His hope was that the bishop would look kindly on his project and not only authorize the work of translation but provide him with a residential chaplaincy while he was engaged on it. In order to show the bishop his quality as a translator from Greek, he had transmitted to him a speech of the Athenian orator Isocrates which he had translated into English. But the bishop was not very encouraging; he told Tyndale that he had no vacancies in the palace at the time, and advised him to find suitable employment elsewhere in London.

No doubt Tyndale could have found employment suitable to his attainments, but what he wanted was leisure to permit him to translate the Bible. Fortunately, he found a friend in Humphrey Monmouth, a wealthy cloth-merchant, who took him into his house for six months, a kind action which brought Monmouth himself into serious trouble some years later. But it became increasingly evident that he would have to go abroad in order to carry out his work of translation; as he puts it later in the preface to his translation of the Pentateuch (printed in 1530), he “vnderstode at the laste not only that there was no rowme in my lorde of londons palace to translate the new testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all englonde, as experience doth now openly declare.”

TYNDALE'S FIRST NEW TESTAMENT

In April or May 1524, therefore, Tyndale sailed for the Continent, taking with him no doubt all the books which he required for his translation project. He spent the best part of a year at Wittenberg, then returned to Hamburg, from which he sent for some money which he had left with Humphrey Monmouth in London, and made his way to Cologne about August 1525. By this time his English New Testament was practically complete, and Cologne suggested itself as a likely place to have it printed in. The work was entrusted to a printer named Peter Quentel, and ten sheets (80 quarto pages) were printed, when information was laid with the city senate and the printer was forbidden to proceed with the work. Tyndale was able to secure the printed sheets before they were seized, and took ship up the Rhine for Worms. Here the work of printing was set afoot from the beginning again, and was completed without mishap. The first complete printed New Testament in English appeared towards the end of February 1526, and copies were beginning to reach England about a month later.

The Worms New Testament is an octavo edition, of which two copies are still in existence—one, complete except for the loss of its title-page, in the Baptist College at Bristol, and the other, imperfect at the beginning and end, in the library of St Paul's Cathedral.

THE COLOGNE QUARTO

But what happened to the sheets of the quarto edition which Tyndale rescued from Quentel's printing house in Cologne? It is probable that he sent some copies of these to England in advance of the Worms edition, to whet people's appetite for the complete New Testament when it was ready. They contained a prologue of fourteen pages, the complete Gospel of Matthew, and the beginning of Mark. For long this fragmentary version was thought to have disappeared completely, but in 1834 the first 64 pages of it (except for the title-page) were identified in a volume where they were bound up with another work. This unique treasure was bought by Thomas Grenville, and later bequeathed by him, with the rest of his library, to the British Museum. A facsimile edition, with an introduction of 70 pages, was issued by Edward Arber in 1871.

The first folio, containing the title-page, is missing; apart from that, we have here the first eight of the original sheets. The prologue of 14 pages is followed by a list of New Testament books; then comes a woodcut showing St Matthew dipping his pen into an inkwell which an angel is holding out to him. This identical woodcut, slightly cut down, was reproduced in a commentary on St Matthew's Gospel published by Quentel in 1526; this is a most conclusive proof that (despite the loss of the title-page) the fragment with which we are dealing is indeed the part of Tyndale's New Testament which Quentel printed at Cologne before the ban was imposed on the continuation of the work. After the woodcut comes the text, beginning at Matt. 1:1 and going on to Matt. 22:12, where the king says to the man who came to his feast without a wedding garment, “frende / howe camyst thou in hydder / and”—and there it breaks off. The first words on the following page (if we supply them from later editions of Tyndale's New Testament) would have been: “hast not on a weddyng garment?”

When we say that it breaks off at Matt. 22:12, we do not mean that it was divided into verses; another quarter of a century went by before the New Testament was first divided into verses. Chapter divisions are marked; both Testaments had been divided into chapters in the thirteenth century by Cardinal Hugh de St. Cher.

The prologue to the Cologne fragment is the work which Tyndale later expanded and issued as a separate tract entitled Pathway into the Scripture. The first page and a half offer his apology for the work: he tells his “brethern and susters moost dere and tenderly beloued in Christ” why he has undertaken to translate the New Testament, and begs them “yf they perceyve in eny places that y have not attayned the very sense of the tonge / or meanynge of the scripture / or haue not geven the right englysshe worde / that they put to there handes to amende it / remembrynge that so is there duetie to doo.” For a further page and a half he gives a straightforward translation of part of Luther's prologue to his 1522 German New Testament, explaining that the gospel is God's news of deliverance from bondage and the fulfilment of the promises made to Abraham. The remaining eleven pages are devoted to a discussion of the relation between law and gospel. This discussion is characterized by an evangelical fervour which, however heart-warming we find it to-day, must have smacked too much of Lutheranism to be acceptable to the civil and ecclesiastical rulers in England of that day. Luther's name is not mentioned, not even where he is quoted for a page and a half, but anyone familiar with his teaching must have recognized it in Tyndale's prologue. Tyndale may have realized that a prologue of this character was apt to prejudice the minds of some readers against his translation from the start; it was omitted from the octavo edition printed at Worms in 1526.

The list of New Testament books which follows the prologue in the Cologne fragment is particularly interesting. It takes this form:

THE BOKES CONTEYNED IN THE NEWE TESTAMENT

i.The gospell of saynct Mathew.
ii. The gospell of S. Marke
iii. The gospell of S. Luke.
iiii. The gospell of S. Jhon.
v. The actes of the apostles written by S. Luke.
vi. The epistle of S. Paul to the Romans.
vii. The fyrst pistle of S. Paul to the Corrinthians.
viii. The second pistle of S. Paul to the Corrinthians.
ix. The pistle of S. Paul to the Galathians.
x. The pistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians.
xi. The pistle of S. Paul to the Philippians.
xii. The pistle of S. Paul to the Collossians.
xiii. The fyrst pistle of S. Paul vnto the Tessalonians.
xiiii. The seconde pistle of S. Paul vnto the Tessalo
          nians.
xv. The fyrst pistle of S. Paul to Timothe.
xvi. The seconde pistle of S. Paul to Timothe.
xvii. The pistle of S. Paul to Titus.
xviii. The pistle of S. Paul vnto Philemon.
xix. The fyrst pistle of S. Peter.
xx. The seconde pistle of S. Peter.
xxi. The fyrst pistle of S. Jhon.
xxii. The seconde pistle of S. Jhon.
xxiii. The thryd pistle of S. Jhon.
                    The pistle vnto the Ebrues.
                    The pistle of S. James.
                    The pistle of Jude.
                    The revelacion of Jhon.

The last four books are separated from the first twenty-three by a space, by special indentation, and by the lack of serial numbers. Why is this? The answer is clear to anyone who looks at the list of New Testament books supplied in Luther's German New Testament of 1522. For Luther separates Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation from the other books by a space and gives them no serial number such as he gives to the first twenty-three. But Luther had his reasons for this; he did not think that these four books had the same high canonical quality as the “capital books”, and expresses his opinion vigorously in his prefaces to the books in question. There is no particular reason to suppose that Tyndale shared Luther's estimate of the “deuterocanonicity” of Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation; he simply followed Luther's arrangement of the list of books, as also did his successors, until the Great Bible of 1539 reverted to the more usual order.

The New Testament text itself is equipped with an apparatus of marginal notes—references to parallel passages in the inner margin, and comments on the text in the outer margin. Of the cross-references the great majority are taken over from Luther's edition; about half of the comments on the text are based on Luther's comments. But the fierceness of some of Luther's comments is absent from Tyndale's. Tyndale's most polemical comment comes at the point where Jesus replies to Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi with the words: “Thou art Peter …” (Matt. 16:17-19).

Peter in the greke sygnieth a stoone in englysshe. This confession is the rocke. Nowe is simon bariona, or simon ionas sonne, called Peter, because of his confession. whosoever then this wyse confesseth of Christe, the same is called Peter. nowe is this confession come too all that are true christen. Then ys every christen man & woman peter. Rede bede, austen & hierom, of the maner of lowsinge & bynding and note howe hierom checketh the presumcion of the pharises in his tyme, which yet had nott so monstrous interpretacions as oure new goddes have feyned. Rede erasmus annotations. Hyt was noot for nought that Christ badd beware of the leven of the pharises. noo thynge is so swete that they make not sowre with there tradicions. The evangelion, that ioyfull tidynges, ys nowe biterer then the olde lawe, Christes burthen is hevier then the yooke of moses, our condicion and estate ys ten tymes more grevious then was ever the iewes. The pharises have so levended Christes swete breed.

But many of the notes are purely calculated to make the sense of the text plainer; thus, against the words “Doo not the publicans even so?” (Matt. 5:46), there is the useful comment:

Publicans gadred rentes, toll, custume, & tribute for the romans, & were comenly hethen men ther vnto appointed of the romans.

It cannot fairly be said that the opposition to Tyndale's New Testament was aroused by the objectionable character of the notes rather than by the text itself.

Here is the form of the Lord's Prayer in this earliest printed fragment of the English New Testament:

O oure father, which art in heven halowed be thy name. Let thy kyngdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them whych treaspas vs. Lede vs nott in to temptacion. but delyvre vs from yvell, Amen.

The incidental resemblances between Tyndale's New Testament and Luther's have led some people to suppose that Tyndale did little more than translate Luther's version into English. This is far from being the truth. Tyndale's version was indeed stigmatized as “Lutheran”; but this epithet was applicable to Tyndale's personal outlook and the principles which led him to translate the New Testament into English rather than to the translation itself. Tyndale did have Luther's German New Testament at his hand for reference, and also the Latin Vulgate, but his work is a translation not of Luther's version but of Erasmus's third printed edition of the Greek Testament, which came out in 1522. Tyndale was a better Greek scholar than Luther, and his rendering is in general closer to the Greek text than Luther's is. On the other hand, there is nothing pedantic about Tyndale's translation; he turns the Greek text into good English, not into a painfully literal rendering of the original idiom.

THE WORMS OCTAVO

The octavo New Testament, printed at Worms after Tyndale had been compelled to leave Cologne, lacked the prologue of the Cologne fragment, as we have seen. Instead, a short epistle to the reader is appended at the end, in which he is exhorted to come to the reading of the sacred words with a pure mind and a single eye, so as to reap the spiritual blessing which they impart, and not to be over-critical of any defects in the translation, which is a first attempt. The translator promises to issue it in a revised and improved form if God grants the opportunity, and meanwhile bespeaks his readers' prayers.

note. Some reviewers have cast doubt on the propriety of quoting sources like John Foxe and William Fulke in what purports to be “a history of translations” (one reviewer describes the story related [by Foxe regarding Tyndale's defiance of the Pope and his laws] as “a blatant fairy tale”). The trustworthiness of Foxe, especially in his account of Tyndale, has been vindicated by recent research; cf. J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (London, 1940); G. Rupp, Six Makers of English Religion (London, 1964), pp. 53 ff. As for Fulke, his narrative commands respect where it is consistent with the course of events already established.

TYNDALE'S LATER YEARS

Now that the whole of the New Testament was safely in print, it had to be got into England, in order that it might be read by the people for whom it was intended. There was ample opportunity to pack copies along with other merchandise, for there was an active trade in many commodities between England and the Continent, and there were several merchants of the calibre of Humphrey Monmouth, who would do their best to help what they believed to be a good work. Nevertheless it was necessary to use caution. Lutheranism was held by the authorities in England, from King Henry downward, to be of the very devil. Tyndale and his associates were known to be infected with Lutheranism, and there could be no question of allowing their books, Bible translations or otherwise, to be imported freely.

THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS

Cuthbert Tonstall, Bishop of London, was specially disturbed by the importation and distribution of Tyndale's New Testament, because naturally his diocese was more affected than anywhere else in the country. In October 1526 he took steps to gather up as many copies as he could within his diocese, ordering their owners to hand them over on pain of excommunication or worse, and those which he collected were publicly burned at St Paul's Cross. But this procedure, though spectacular, could do little to check the circulation of the books, and the bishop conceived the plan of buying them up in large quantities on the Continent, and thus making sure that they would not come to England except to be burned.

A quaint account of this matter is given in the Chronicle of Edward Halle, who tells how Bishop Tonstall, during a visit to the Continent, met in Antwerp a London merchant named Augustine Packington, who was well disposed to Tyndale. The bishop told Packington how eager he was to buy up as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament as he could, and Packington assured him that, if the bishop provided money to pay for the New Testaments, he could buy them in large quantities, for he was well acquainted with the merchants who were handling them. Then Halle goes on:

The bishop, thinking that he had God by the toe, when indeed he had (as after he thought) the devil by the fist, said: “Gentle Master Packington, do your diligence and get them, and with all my heart I will pay for them, whatsoever they cost you; for the books are erroneous and naughty, and I intend surely to destroy them all, and to burn them at Paul's Cross.” Augustine Packington came to William Tyndale and said: “William, I know thou art a poor man, and hast a heap of New Testaments and books by thee, for the which thou hast both endangered thy friends and beggared thyself; and I have now gotten thee a merchant, which with ready money shall dispatch thee of all that thou hast, if you think it so profitable for yourself.” “Who is the merchant?” said Tyndale. “The bishop of London,” said Packington. “Oh, that is because he will burn them,” said Tyndale. “Yea marry,” quoth Packington. “I am the gladder,” said Tyndale; “for these two benefits shall come thereof: I shall get money of him for these books, to bring myself out of debt, and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God's word. And the overplus of the money, that shall remain to me, shall make me more studious to correct the said New Testament, and so newly to imprint the same once again; and I trust the second will much better like you than ever did the first.” And so forward went the bargain: the bishop had the books, Packington had the thanks, and Tyndale had the money.

It is a good story, and no doubt basically true, even if Halle has added some colour and vivacity to the details. The bishop certainly did buy up many of Tyndale's books to destroy them and thus prevent them from doing any harm, but (as might have been expected) the money with which he paid for the books was used for the production of further copies. Halle tells us how the bishop met Packington later in London and complained that copies of Tyndale's New Testament were coming into the country in greater quantities than ever. Packington assured him that he had kept his side of the bargain, but suggested that it might really be necessary for the bishop to buy up the standing type as well, if he wanted to prevent the circulation of the books effectively.

The bishop had probably discussed the idea of buying up the offending books with some of his friends and colleagues, and there is evidence that one at least of these told him what the result would be. For, to quote Halle's Chronicle again:

Shortly after, it fortuned one George Constantine to be apprehended by Sir Thomas More, which then was lord chancellor of England, of suspicion of certain heresies. And this Constantine being with More, after divers examinations of divers things, among other Master More said in this wise to Constantine: “Constantine, I would have thee plain with me in one thing that I will ask of thee, and I promise thee I will show thee favour in all the other things, whereof thou art accused to me. There is beyond the sea Tyndale, Joye, and a great many more of you. I know they cannot live without help: some sendeth them money and succoureth them; and thyself, being one of them, hadst part thereof, and therefore knowest from whence it came; I pray thee, who be they that thus help them?” “My lord,” quoth Constantine, “will you that I shall tell you the truth?” “Yea, I pray thee,” quoth my lord. “Marry I will,” quoth Constantine. “Truly,” quoth he, “it is the bishop of London that hath holpen us; for he hath bestowed among us a great deal of money in New Testaments to burn them, and that hath been, and yet is, our only succour and comfort.” “Now by my troth,” quoth More, “I think even the same, and I said so much to the bishop, when he went about to buy them.”

MORE AND TYNDALE

But burning was not the only form of attack that was launched against Tyndale's New Testament. In 1528 Sir Thomas More issued a Dialogue, in which he “treated divers matters, as of the veneration and worship of images and relics, praying to saints and going on pilgrimage, with many other things touching the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale, by the tone begun in Saxony, and by the tother labored to be brought into England.” In the course of this Dialogue he attacked Tyndale's New Testament. Tyndale replied in 1531 with An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, and this brought forth from More in the following year a larger work, entitled The Confutation of Tyndale.

It affords no pleasure to us to-day to contemplate two great Englishmen, men of principle who were both to suffer death for conscience' sake, engaging in bitter controversy of this kind. But the issue was one in which the lives of men—and, as both Tyndale and More believed, the souls of men—were at stake; and both men would probably have thought that the urbanities of modern theological debate betokened a failure to appreciate the seriousness of the issue. Yet More was no bigoted obscurantist; he was a leading humanist and patron of the new learning, and a warm friend of Erasmus, whose Greek New Testament Tyndale had now turned into English. One might have thought that he would at least have appreciated the cultural value of Tyndale's work, however much he deplored Tyndale's theological position.

But no: Tyndale's New Testament, said More, was not the New Testament at all; it was a cunning counterfeit, so perverted in the interests of heresy “that it was not worthy to be called Christ's testament, but either Tyndale's own testament or the testament of his master Antichrist.” To search for errors in it was like searching for water in the sea; it was so bad that it could not be mended, “for it is easier to make a web of new cloth than it is to sew up every hole in a net.”

We may well rub our eyes at these charges. Tyndale's New Testament lies before us, and Erasmus's Greek Testament of which it is a translation, and we can only be surprised that a scholar like More should go to such lengths in denouncing so good an achievement. True, there were things in it which were capable of improvement, as Tyndale himself acknowledged, but it was a pioneer work; the New Testament had never been turned from Greek directly into English before. Tyndale complained that if his printer so much as failed to dot an i, it was solemnly noted down and reckoned as a heresy.

When More's charges are examined, they amount to nothing more than a complaint that Tyndale translated certain ecclesiastical terms by English words which lacked ecclesiastical associations. Thus he used “congregation” and not “church”, “senior” (in later editions, “elder”) and not “priest” (where the Greek had presbyteros), “repentance” and not “penance”, “love” and not “charity”, and so forth. But no fault can be found with Tyndale in this regard from the standpoint of pure scholarship; in fact, his translations at times are more accurate than those which More preferred. And indeed Tyndale could point to Erasmus, More's great friend, for a precedent. For Erasmus had not only edited the New Testament in Greek; he had also translated it afresh into Latin. And in Erasmus's Latin translation the Greek word ekklesia (“church”) appeared at times as congregatio, Greek presbyteros appeared as senior or presbyter (and not as sacerdos, which in the Latin Bible was traditionally reserved for “priest” in the Jewish or pagan sense), and so forth. Why should such translations be branded as heretical in Tyndale's English version when they were tolerated in Erasmus's Latin version? Because, said More, he found no such “malicious intent” in Erasmus as he found in Tyndale. In short, it was not the translation but the translator that More really objected to.

OLD TESTAMENT TRANSLATION

It was not only Bible translation that Tyndale engaged in during these years. He took a vigorous part in the theological and political disputation of the day; one of his works, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), finding considerable favour with no less illustrious a reader than Henry VIII. We may wish that he had given himself exclusively to his Bible translation, because then he might have come near to translating the whole Bible; but we must allow him his own judgment of what the times demanded in the way of earnestly contending for the faith. By 1530 he had completed and published the translation of the first five books of the Old Testament from Hebrew; he followed this up the following year with an edition of Jonah—“Jonas made out by Tyndale,” wrote Sir Thomas More, “a book that whoso delight therein shall stand in peril that Jonas was never so swallowed up by the whale as by the delight of that book a man's soul may be swallowed up by the devil that he shall never have the grace to get out again.” A translation of the historical books of the Old Testament, from Joshua to 2 Chronicles, is also most probably to be attributed to him; it was not published during his lifetime, but was incorporated in “Matthew's Bible”, which appeared in 1537.

Tyndale's Old Testament translation is free, bold and idiomatic; he indulges to the limit his preference for translating the same original word by a variety of English synonyms. The serpent says to Eve in Genesis 3:4, “Tush, ye shall not die”; in Genesis 39:2 we read that “the Lorde was with Ioseph, and he was a luckie felowe”; in Exodus 15:4 Pharaoh's “jolly captains” are drowned in the Red Sea, and in verse 26 of the same chapter God introduces Himself as “the Lord thy surgeon”. Some of the marginal notes make amusing reading to-day, though we can understand why they were not universally appreciated at the time. Against Exodus 32:35, where we read of the pestilence that broke out among the Israelites after their worship of the golden calf, he remarks: “The Pope's bull slayeth more than Aaron's calf.” On Exodus 36:5-7, where the people are asked not to bring any more offerings for the building of the tabernacle, because they have already contributed more than enough, he says: “When will the Pope say ‘Hoo! [Hold!]’ and forbid an offering for the building of St Peter's church? And when will our spirituality say ‘Hoo!’ and forbid to give them more land? Never until they have all.” On Leviticus 21:5, where the priests of Israel are forbidden to “make tonsures upon their heads” (R.S.V.), he notes: “Of the heathen priests, then, our prelates took the example of their bald pates.”

THE NEW TESTAMENT REVISED

A revision of Genesis was published in 1534. But a more urgent task demanded Tyndale's attention. The situation in England was changing; King Henry had quarrelled with the Pope, Sir Thomas More had resigned his office of Lord Chancellor on conscientious grounds, and Thomas Cromwell was rapidly rising to a position of high favour and influence with the king. Cromwell was a warm advocate of the circulation and reading of the Bible in the vernacular. The demand for copies of the Bible, or at least the New Testament, in English was rising, and pirate printings of Tyndale's New Testament began to appear on the market. The fact that they were pirate printings was not the worst thing about them; the text was deliberately changed in places, and not changed for the better. The chief offender in this matter was George Joye, a former associate of Tyndale. Tyndale was naturally indignant at this conduct. In the postscript to his New Testament of 1526 he had promised that he would endeavour to revise his work, “as it were to set it better, and to make it more apt for the weak stomachs: desiring them that are learned, and able, to remember their duty, and to help thereunto; and to bestow unto the edifying of Christ's body (which is the congregation of them that believe) those gifts which they have received of God for the same purpose.” He was now actively engaged with this work of revision, and did not take it kindly that Joye had forestalled him. When Tyndale's revised New Testament did make its appearance, in November 1534, the prologue contained the following sharp admonition to Joye and others like him:

Wherefore I beseech George Joye, yea and all other too, for to translate the scripture for themselves, whether out of Greek, Latin or Hebrew. Or (if they will needs) … let them take my translations and labours, and change and alter, and correct and corrupt at their pleasures, and call it their own translations, and put to their own names, and not to play bo-peep after George Joye's manner. Which whether he have done faithfully and truly, with such reverence and fear as becometh the word of God, and with such love and meekness and affection to unity and circumspection that the ungodly have no occasion to rail on the verity, as becometh the servants of Christ, I refer it to the judgments of them that know and love the truth. For this, I protest that I provoke not Joye nor any other man (but am provoked and that after the spitefullest manner of provoking) to do sore against my will and with sorrow of heart that I now do. But I neither can nor will suffer of any man, that he shall go take my translation and correct it without name, and make such changing as I myself durst not do, as I hope to have my part in Christ, though the whole world should be given me for my labour.

Tyndale was particularly annoyed at Joye's foolish alteration of “resurrection” to “life after this life” or the like. Had Joye put out this mistranslation under his own name, he would have been welcome to the credit that it brought him; but Tyndale naturally did not like it to be assumed that he himself had authorized this and similar changes.

However, with the publication of The Newe Testament dylygently corrected and compared with the Greke by Willyam Tindale the pirate editions were seen for what they were. Although Tyndale produced a further revision in 1535—The New Testament yet once again corrected by Willyam Tindale—it is the 1534 edition that is to be regarded as his definitive version of the New Testament. Bishop Westcott describes this version as “altogether Tyndale's noblest monument”. It is no superficial revision; the whole work has been gone over in scrupulous detail, and nearly always the changes are for the better, reflecting mature judgment and feeling.

When we talk of Tyndale's version of the New Testament as being basic to the successive revisions which have appeared between his day and ours—more particularly the Authorized Version, the Revised Version and the Revised Standard Version—it is his 1534 edition that is meant. “Tindale's honesty, sincerity, and scrupulous integrity,” says Professor J. Isaacs, “his simple directness, his magical simplicity of phrase, his modest music, have given an authority to his wording that has imposed itself on all later versions. With all the tinkering to which the New Testament has been subject, Tindale's version is still the basis in phrasing, rendering, vocabulary, rhythm, and often in music as well. Nine-tenths of the Authorized New Testament is still Tindale, and the best is still his.”¹ More than that: in a number of places where the Authorized Version of 1611 departs from Tyndale's wording, the Revisers of 1881 return to it. For example, the A.V. of John 10:16 makes Jesus say that when He has called His “other sheep … which are not of this fold”—that is, not of the Jewish people—“there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” But this rendering misses the point of His statement by using the word “fold” to translate two quite different Greek words; it is a defect which goes back to the Latin version. Tyndale had already given the correct rendering: “and other shepe I have, which are not of this folde. Them also must I bringe, that they maye heare my voyce, and that ther maye be one flocke and one shepeherde.” And the Revisers of 1881 follow him almost word for word: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd.”

There is a general prologue, entitled “W.T. unto the reader,” which begins with the words: “Here thou hast (most dear reader) the new Testament or covenant made with us of God in Christ's blood.” There are special prologues to the Epistles of the New Testament, of which that to the Epistle to the Romans is the longest; it is, in fact, a treatise in itself, of about equal length with the epistle which it introduces. To Tyndale, as to Luther, the Epistle to the Romans was “the principal and most excellent part of the New Testament, and most pure Euangelion, that is to say glad tidings and that we call gospel, and also a light and a way into the whole scripture.” Towards the end of the prologue he says:

Wherefore it appeareth evidently, that Paul's mind was to comprehend briefly in this epistle all the whole learning of Christ's gospel, and to prepare an introduction unto all the Old Testament. For without doubt whosoever hath this epistle perfectly in his heart, the same hath the light and the effect of the Old Testament with him. Wherefore let every man without exception exercise himself therein diligently, and record it night and day continually, until he be full acquainted therewith.

And finally:

Now go to, reader, and according to the order of Paul's writing, even so do thou. First behold thyself diligently in the law of God, and see there thy just damnation. Secondarily turn thine eyes to Christ, and see there the exceeding mercy of thy most kind and loving Father. Thirdly remember that Christ made not this atonement that thou shouldest anger God again: neither died he for thy sins, that thou shouldest live still in them: neither cleansed he thee, that thou shouldest return (as a swine) unto thine old puddle again: but that thou shouldest be a new creature and live a new life after the will of God and not of the flesh. And be diligent lest through thine own negligence and unthankfulness thou lose this favour and mercy again.

Is not this the very heart of the Reformation message?

This is the rendering of the Lord's Prayer in the 1534 New Testament:

O oure father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy kyngdome come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as it ys in heven. Geve vs thisdaye oure dayly breede. And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve oure trespacers. And leade vs not into temptacion: but delyver vs from evell. For thyne is the kyngedome and the power, and the glorye for ever. Amen.

If we compare this rendering with that from the Cologne fragment of 1525, we notice that the doxology is added in this version,² and also that the phrase “them whych treaspas vs” has now been replaced by “oure trespacers”. As for the considerable variations in spelling, that simply shows how free and easy a matter spelling was in Tyndale's day.

The parable of the Good Samaritan appears as follows in the 1534 version:

A certayne man descended from Hierusalem in to Hierico, and fell in to the hondes of theves, which robbed him of his rayment and wounded him, and departed levynge him halfe deed. And by chaunce ther came a certayne preste that same waye, and when he sawe him, he passed by. And lykewyse a Levite, when he was come nye to the place, went and loked on him, and passed by. Then a certayne Samaritane, as he iornyed, came nye vnto him, and when he sawe him, had compassion on him, and went to and bounde vp his woundes, and poured in oyle and wyne, and put him on his awne beaste, and brought him to a commen ynne, and made provision for him. And on the morowe when he departed, he toke out two pence and gave them to the host, and sayde vnto him. Take cure of him, and whatsoever thou spendest moare, when I come agayne, I will recompence the. Which now of these thre, thynkest thou, was neighbour vnto him that fell into the theves hondes? And he sayde: he that shewed mercy on him. Then sayde Iesus vnto him. Goo and do thou lyke wyse.

How closely the A.V. follows Tyndale's wording here needs no emphasizing.

The opening paragraph of Hebrews is rendered as follows by Tyndale in this edition:

God in tyme past diversly and many wayes, spake vnto the fathers by Prophetes: but in these last dayes he hath spoken vnto uv by his sonne, whom he hath made heyre of all thinges: by whom also he made the worlde. Which sonne beynge the brightnes of his glory, and very ymage of his substance, bearinge vp all thinges with the worde of his power, hath in his awne person pourged oure synnes, and is sitten on the right honde of the maiestie an hye, and is more excellent then the angels, in as moche as he hath by inheritaunce obteyned an excellenter name then have they.

Here the A.V. has departed farther from Tyndale, but it is plain to whom we are indebted for the final clause of this paragraph in the A.V., “as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they”—except that the rather clumsy comparative “excellenter” has been replaced by “more excellent”.

There are marginal notes in this New Testament, but they lack the polemical pungency of those appearing in Tyndale's Pentateuch. That is really all to the good; however much enjoyment later generations of readers—Roman Catholics and Protestants alike—may derive from reading comments about the Pope's bull slaying more than Aaron's calf and so forth, notes and comments which reflect particular points of view inevitably limit the usefulness of Bible translations, good as those translations may be in themselves. In his 1534 New Testament Tyndale contents himself for the most part with supplying notes which explain, summarize or apply the text in a generally helpful manner. In the Gospels marginal references to parallel passages are given.

THE OLD TESTAMENT EPISTLES

As an appendix to the New Testament, this edition contains Tyndale's translation of the Old Testament “Epistles” prescribed to be read in church on certain days in the year according to the use of Sarum. Some of these “Epistles” are taken from the poetical and prophetical books of the Old Testament, and as we read them in Tyndale's translation we find ourselves wishing that he could have lived long enough to translate the whole of the Old Testament. For Tyndale did not translate these from the Latin of the service-book, but from the Hebrew (or from the Greek, in the case of readings from the Apocrypha). Here is the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, appointed for the Wednesday after Palm Sunday:

Esaias sayde, lorde, who beleueth oure sayinges, and the arme of the lorde, to whome is it opened? He came vp as a sparow before him, and as a rote oute of a drye lande. There was nether fassyon or bewtie on him. And when we looked on him, there was no godlynes that we shuld lust after him. He was despised and cast oute of mennes companye, and one that had soffered sorowe, and had experynce of infirmitie: and we were as one that had hid his face from him. He was so despisable, that we estemed him not.

Truly he tooke vpon him oure deseases, and bare oure sorowes. And yet we counted him plaged, and beaten and humbled of God. He was wounded for oure transgression, and brused for oure iniquities. The correccion that brought vs peace was on him, and with his strypes we were healed. And we went astraye as shepe, and turned euery man his waye: and the lorde put on him the wyckednes of vs all.

He soffered wronge and was euell entreated, and yet opened not his mouth: he was as a shepe ledde to be slayne: and as a lambe before his sherer, he was domme and opened not his mouth. By the reason of the afflyccion, he was not estemed: and yet his generacion who can nombre? When he is taken from the erth of lyuynge men: for my peoples transgression he was plaged. He put his sepulchre with the wycked, and with the ryche in his deth: because he dyd none iniquitie, nether was gyle founde in his mouth.

And yet the lorde determyned to bruse him with infirmities. His soule gevynge hirselfe for transgression, he shall se seed of long continuaunce, and the will of the lorde shall prospere in his hande. Because of the laboure of his soule, he shall se and be satisfied. With his knowledge, he beynge iust, shall iustifie my saruauntes and that a great nombre: and he shall beare their iniquities. Therfore I will geue him his parte in many and the spoyle of the ryche he shall deuyde: because he gaue his soule to death, and was nombred with the trespasers, and he bare the synne of many, and made intercession for transgressors.

This translation has had a less direct influence on the familiar Authorized Version wording of Isaiah 53; yet now and again we recognize a familiar cadence, and could well believe that Tyndale's rendering of this and other liturgical “Epistles” was consulted by those who completed his work by translating the prophets into English. “He came up as a sparow” at the beginning of verse 2 is an odd rendering; “tender plant” or “young plant” is what the Hebrew word means here, and the Latin Vulgate translates accordingly. But the same word can mean “suckling” in an appropriate context, and the Greek Septuagint accordingly mistranslates it as a “young child”. Most probably, however, “sparow” here is a misprint for “spraye” (meaning tender twig or shoot). In verse ii the singular “servant” becomes the plural “saruauntes” and is object instead of subject. This could be the meaning of the Hebrew word if one had regard to the consonants only and not to the vowel-signs (which were added later, about the ninth century a.d.), but it is ruled out by the context. However, Tyndale's rendering at the beginning of verse 10, “And yet the lorde determyned to bruse him with infirmities”, conforms more closely than either A.V., R.V. or R.S.V to what scholars nowadays generally consider the original Hebrew to have said; Dr Christopher R. North, for example, in his rendering of the clause adopts the same construction as Tyndale: “Yet Yahweh was pleased to crush him with sickness.”³

Here is another of these Epistles, this time from the second chapter of the Song of Songs, verses 1-4 and 10-14, prescribed for the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin:

I am the floure of the felde, and lylyes of the valeyes. As the lylye amonge the thornes so is my loue amonge the daughters. As the apple tre amonge the trees of the wood so is my beloued amonge the sonnes, in his shadow was my desyer to syt, for his frute was swete to my mouth. He brought me into his wyne seller: and his behauer to mewarde was louely. Beholde my beloued sayde to me: vp and hast my loue, my doue, my bewtifull and come, for now is wynter gone and rayne departed and past. The floures apere in oure contre and the tyme is come to cut the vynes. The voyce of the turtle doue is harde in oure lande. The fygge tre hath brought forth hir fygges, and the vyne blossoms geue a sauoure. Vp hast my loue, my doue, in the holes of the rocke and secret places of the walles. Shew me thy face and let me here thy voyce, for thy voyce is swete and thy fassyon bewtifull.

Something seems to have fallen out here at the end of verse 13; either the translator's eye or the printer's has skipped a few words. The expression “wyne seller”, which seems less appropriate than A.V. “banqueting house”, follows the Latin closely; so also the Douai version says “He brought me into the cellar of wine” (but the Knox version says “banqueting-hall”). The Hebrew expression means literally “house of wine”.

A de luxe copy of this New Testament, bound in vellum, with gold edges, was presented to Queen Anne Boleyn, probably by an Antwerp merchant to whom she had done a service in time of need. The words Anna Regina Angliae can be faintly discerned in red on the gold edges of the volume, which is in the British Museum.

IMPRISONMENT AND DEATH

Antwerp, which was Tyndale's residence in his closing years, was a free city; but the surrounding territory was under the control of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Tyndale's enemies could take no legal action against him in Antwerp, but in the emperor's domains it would be easy to proceed against him for heresy. On May 21, 1535, he was treacherously kidnapped, conveyed out of Antwerp, and imprisoned in the fortress of Vilvorde, some six miles north of Brussels, where he remained until October of the following year. Thomas Cromwell made an energetic attempt to procure his release, and even Henry VIII bestirred himself somewhat in Tyndale's cause, however little he approved of his Lutheranism. But Charles V was in no mood to respond to such overtures; he was nephew to Katharine of Aragon, whom Henry had recently divorced, so that he had personal and political as well as religious reasons for allowing the law against heretics to take its tedious course with Tyndale.

The most interesting piece of information about Tyndale's imprisonment came to light about the middle of last century in the form of a letter written in his own hand to someone in authority, probably the Marquis of Bergen. It is undated, but was written evidently at the beginning of the last winter of Tyndale's life. It is in the Latin language; here is the English translation:

I believe, right worshipful, that you are not unaware of what may have been determined concerning me. Wherefore I beg your lordship, and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woollen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, provided that it be consistent with the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ, whose Spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen.

W. Tindalus

The resemblance has often been noted between this letter and another letter from prison, Paul's last letter in which he urges his friend Timothy to do his best to visit him before winter, and to bring when he comes “the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Tim. 4:13).

Evidently Tyndale was anxious to continue his work of translating the Old Testament. It would be pleasant if we could believe that his request was granted, and that he was not only able to keep himself a little warmer, but permitted to have his Hebrew books with him in his cell. But his surveillance must have been strict if he found it necessary to approach so exalted a dignitary in order to have the use of his own warmer clothes, and the authorities may have judged it to be out of the question to grant him access to literature which he could only use in further heretical activity. In August 1536 Tyndale was found guilty of heresy, degraded from his priestly office, and handed over to the secular power for execution, which was carried out on October 6. In the words of John Foxe, “he was brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to the stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterwards with fire consumed, in the morning at the town of Vilvorde, a.d. 1536; crying thus at the stake with a fervent zeal and a loud voice: ‘Lord, open the King of England's eyes’.”

Tyndale probably did not know that, some months before his death, a version of the Bible in English, which drew largely upon his own work, was circulating in his native land with King Henry's permission. In the sense which Tyndale intended, the King of England's eyes were already opening when he voiced his dying prayer.⁴

THE COMPLETE ENGLISH BIBLE PRINTED AND LICENSED

MYLES COVERDALE

Next to Tyndale, the man to whom lovers of the English Bible owe the greatest debt is Myles Coverdale (1488-1569). Coverdale was not the scholar that Tyndale was, but the best part of his life was devoted to the task of making the Bible accessible to his fellow-countrymen in their own tongue. In addition to the version regularly known as “Coverdale's Bible”, which appeared in 1535, he edited the Great Bible of 1539 and had some part in the preparation of the Geneva Bible before its publication in 1560. In addition to these major enterprises, he produced diglots or bilingual editions in Latin and English—of the New Testament in 1538, and of the Psalter in 1540. These diglots, however, do not play the part in the main line of development of the English Bible that is played by the great versions in which Coverdale had so active a share.

Coverdale was a native of York, a graduate of Cambridge, and an Augustinian friar. He left his order, however, after coming under the influence of the Reformation movement. In 1528 he was compelled to seek safety on the Continent, where he spent some time as assistant to Tyndale in Hamburg and as a proof-reader in Antwerp. In 1535 he returned to England, where for a short time he enjoyed the patronage of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. But with Anne's execution, Cromwell's fall from power and a change in the king's ecclesiastical policy in 1540, Coverdale found it necessary to return to the Continent, and he remained there until the king's death in 1547. Soon after the accession of Edward VI he came back to England, and became Bishop of Exeter in 1551.

Coverdale did not enjoy his episcopal office for long; he was deposed when Mary Tudor ascended the throne in 1553, and it was only through the intervention of the King of Denmark that he did not go to the stake as so many other leading Reformers went in her reign, but was allowed to go into exile for a third time. He spent the latter part of his third exile in Geneva, where he became an elder of the English church, and stood as godfather to the minister's second son. The minister was John Knox. This was not Coverdale's only connection with Scotland; his wife, Elizabeth Macheson, was a Scotswoman.⁵

Coverdale returned to England for the last time in 1559, and shortly after his arrival he took part in the historic consecration of Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury. But for the last ten years of his life he did not figure much in public affairs. Not only were the infirmities of old age beginning to tell on him, but his strong Puritan convictions could not be reconciled to many features of the Elizabethan religious settlement.

COVERDALE'S BIBLE

It was apparently at the instance of Jacob van Meteren, a merchant of Antwerp, that Coverdale undertook to produce a version of the Bible in English. The printing was finished in October 1535, and the work was published under the title: The Bible: that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn into Englishe. This was the first complete printed Bible in English. It was printed on the Continent (probably at Cologne) but it was quickly imported into England; a dedication to Henry VIII, printed (it appears) in Southwark, was inserted in those copies which were so imported.

The dedication speaks in severely critical terms of the Pope, who is compared to Caiaphas; yet even as Caiaphas spoke better than he knew when he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, so the Pope did better than he knew when he conferred the title “Defender of the Faith” on King Henry. For King Henry has proved himself a worthier Defender of the Faith than the Pope envisaged.

And the truth of our Balaam's prophecy is, that Your Grace in very deed should defend the Faith, yea even the true faith of Christ, no dreams, no fables, no heresy, no papistical inventions, but the uncorrupt faith of God's most holy Word, which to set forth (praised be the goodness of God, and increase your gracious purpose) Your Highness with your most honourable council applieth all his study and endeavour.

Coverdale evidently shared a widely held belief that King Henry had come round to the view that an authorized English translation of the Bible should be made available to the people. Indeed, when Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, the Church of England acquired a Primate who lent all the weight of his high office to this and similar causes, and in December 1534 Convocation of Canterbury petitioned the King to decree “that the holy scripture should be translated into the vulgar English tongue by certain good and learned men, to be nominated by His Majesty, and should be delivered to the people for their instruction.”

King Henry probably responded to this petition by telling Cranmer to set about preparing a suitable version; at any rate there is evidence that Cranmer himself, with a few other divines, took steps to revise an existing translation of the New Testament books. (The existing translation was almost certainly Tyndale's.) However, nothing came of this enterprise. For one thing, not all the bishops of the province of Canterbury were so enthusiastic about it as Cranmer was; for another thing, the work of revision was still incomplete when Coverdale's whole Bible appeared, with a dedication to the King.

KING HENRY VIII AND COVERDALE'S BIBLE

Thomas Cromwell's interest was enlisted in the new translation, and it was he no doubt who drew his royal master's attention to it. The king, if he followed his usual custom, would submit the matter to various advisers, and then, after hearing their opinions, make his mind up for himself. Evidently he took this course with the new Bible, and when the bishops whom he directed to read it and report on it seemed to him to be a long time in coming to a decision he summoned them to his presence. They had various criticisms to make of it on the score of translation and the like. “Well,” said he, “but are there any heresies maintained thereby?” They had to admit that they could find none. “If there be no heresies,” said he, “then in God's name let it go abroad among our people.”⁶ To our present-day taste the flattering language with which Coverdale began his dedication to the king may appear over-fulsome; but it no doubt helped towards this desirable issue. The king's approval was given only by word of mouth, and no formal royal permission could be recorded on the title-page; but no doubt Cromwell and others interested in the circulation of the Bible knew when it was advisable to be grateful for small mercies.

Coverdale's dedication to the king ended with the following paragraph:

Considering now (most gracious prince) the inestimable treasure, fruit and prosperity everlasting, that God giveth with his Word, and trusting in his infinite goodness that he would bring my simple and good labour herein to good effect, therefore as the Holy Ghost moved other men to do the cost thereof, so was I boldened in God to labour in the same. Again, considering Your Imperial Majesty not only to be my natural sovereign liege Lord and chief Head of the Church of England, but also the true defender and maintainer of God's laws, I thought it my duty and to belong unto my allegiance, when I had translated this Bible, not only to dedicate this translation unto Your Highness, but wholly to commit it unto the same: to the intent that if anything therein be translated amiss (for in many things we fail, even when we think to be sure) it may stand in Your Grace's hands to correct it, to amend it, to improve it, yea and clean to reject it, if your godly wisdom shall think it necessary. And as I do with all humbleness submit mine understanding and my poor translation unto the spirit of truth in Your Grace, so make I this protestation (having God to record in my conscience) that I have neither wrested nor altered so much as one word for the maintenance of any manner of sect: but have with a clear conscience purely and faithfully translated this out of five sundry interpreters, having only the manifest truth of the scripture before mine eyes: trusting in the goodness of God, that it shall be unto his worship; quietness and tranquillity unto Your Highness, a perfect stablishment of all God's ordinances within Your Grace's dominion, a general comfort to all Christian hearts, and a continual thankfulness both of old and young unto God, and to Your Grace, for being our Moses, and for bringing us out of this old Egypt from the cruel hands of our spiritual Pharaoh. For where were the Jews (by ten thousand parts) so much bound unto King David, for subduing of great Goliath and all their enemies, as we are to Your Grace, for delivering us out of our old Babylonical captivity? For the which deliverance and victory I beseek our only mediator Jesus Christ, to make such means for us unto his heavenly Father, that we never be unthankful unto him nor unto Your Grace: but that we ever increase in the fear of him, in obedience unto Your Highness, in love unfeigned unto our neighbours, and in all virtue that cometh of God. To whom for the defending of his blessed Word (by Your Grace's most rightful administration) be honour and thanks, glory and dominion, world without end. Amen.

COVERDALE'S SOURCES

The original title-page describes this version as being “faithfully and truly translated out of Douche [i.e., German] and Latyn into Englishe.” Coverdale's dedication speaks of his having “purely and faithfully translated this out of five sundry interpreters”. In the translator's prologue to the “Christian reader”, which follows the dedication to the king, this is amplified in the first paragraph:

Considering how excellent knowledge and learning an interpreter of scripture ought to have in the tongues, and pondering also mine own insufficiency therein, and how weak I am to perform the office of a translator, I was the more loath to meddle with this work. Notwithstanding when I considered how great pity it was that we should want it so long, and called to my remembrance the adversity of them which were not only of ripe knowledge, but would also with all their hearts have performed that they began, if they had not had impediment: considering (I say) that by reason of their adversity it could not so soon have been brought to an end, as our most prosperous nation would fain have had it: these and other reasonable causes considered, I was the more bold to take it in hand. And to help me herein, I have had sundry translations, not only in Latin, but also of the Dutch interpreters: whom (because of their singular gifts and special diligence in the Bible) I have been the more glad to follow for the most part, according as I was required. But to say the truth before God, it was neither my labour nor desire to have this work put in my hand: nevertheless it grieved me that other nations should be more plenteously provided for with the scripture in their mother tongue than we: therefore when I was instantly required, though I could not do so well as I would, I thought it yet my duty to do my best, and that with a good will.

Coverdale makes no pretence of being expert in “the tongues”—that is to say, in Hebrew and Greek. In this regard he compares himself, to his own disadvantage, with others who have both the linguistic ability and the hearty desire to carry out the task of Bible translation. But these men, because of some “impediment”, have not been able to finish what they began. Who are these men? To one at least, and that the most outstanding of all, we can readily give a name: William Tyndale, after translating the New Testament, had made a good beginning with the Old; but at the time when Coverdale's Bible was published Tyndale had already spent five months in prison at Vilvorde—sufficient “impediment” to the completion of a work so well begun. It was not politic to mention Tyndale's name, either in the prologue to the reader or in the dedication to the king, but of the “five sundry interpreters” mentioned in the latter document as Coverdale's sources one was undoubtedly Tyndale. It is easy to show Coverdale's dependence on Tyndale's work in the New Testament, the Pentateuch and Jonah. Why then is mention made only of Latin and “Dutch” (German) versions on the title-page and in the prologue to the reader? Perhaps Coverdale's intention was to indicate simply the non-English versions on which he relied; as an honest man, he wished to make it plain that he could not translate directly from Hebrew and Greek: Latin and German were the foreign languages to which he had to confine himself. But possibly later reflection suggested to him that the mention of Latin and German versions only might be unfair to Tyndale; at any rate, when new preliminary sheets were printed for the copies of his Bible which were to circulate in England, the Latin and German versions were not mentioned on the title-page, which now simply described the version as “faithfully translated into English”.

If Tyndale's version was one of the five on which Coverdale depended, what were the other four? Two were apparently Latin—the Vulgate, of course, and also a new Latin translation from the original texts made by the Dominican scholar Sanctes Pagninus in 1528. Of the German versions Luther's is obviously one; the other has been proved to be one in which Luther's text was adapted to the Swiss dialect of German, published at Zurich in 1524-29. It was on this last version that Coverdale principally relied in the Old Testament, although he made extensive use of Tyndale's work for those Old Testament books which had been published in Tyndale's translation. Coverdale's New Testament was basically Tyndale's version revised in the light of the German versions, and not noticeably improved thereby. He not only translates characteristic German compound words literally (like “unoutspeakable” in Rom. 8:26), but evidently likes this sort of thing so well that he even coins similar compounds where they do not appear in the German versions (like “burntofferingaltar” in 1 Maccabees 4:53).

VARIOUS FEATURES OF COVERDALE'S BIBLE

Coverdale's Bible was the first to introduce chapter-summaries as distinct from the terse chapter-headings found in copies of the Vulgate. These summaries are sometimes summaries and nothing more, as when St Matthew's fourth chapter is summarized:

Christ fasteth and is tempted: he calleth Peter, Andrew, Iames and Ihon, & healeth all the sicke.

But an explanatory or hortatory note may be included, as when the following chapter is summarized thus:

In this chapter and in the two next folowinge is conteyned the most excellent and louynge Sermon of Christ in the mount: which sermon is the very keye that openeth the vnderstondinge in to the lawe. In this fifth chapter specially he preacheth of the VIII beatitudes or blessinges, of manslaughter, wrath and anger: of aduoutrie, of swearinge, of suffringe wronge, and of loue euen towarde a mans enemies.

Again, Coverdale's Bible was the first to separate the books of the Apocrypha from the other Old Testament books and print them by themselves as an appendix to the Old Testament—a precedent followed by English Protestant Bibles ever since (in so far as they include the Apocrypha at all). In the first edition of Coverdale Baruch retained its traditional place between Lamentations and Ezekiel, but in an edition of 1537 Baruch, too, was relegated to the appendix. Coverdale introduced this appendix with a special note entitled “The Translator unto the Reader”, which is interesting enough to reproduce in full:

These books (good reader) which be called Apocrypha, are not judged among the doctors to be of like reputation with the other scripture, as thou mayest perceive by S. Jerome in epistola ad Paulinum. And the chief cause thereof is this: there be many places in them, that seem to be repugnant unto the open and manifest truth in the other books of the Bible. Nevertheless I have not gathered them together to the intent that I would have them despised, or little set by, or that I should think them false, for I am not able to prove it. Yea I doubt not verily, if they were equally conferred with the other open scripture (time, place and circumstance in all things considered) they should neither seem contrary, nor be untruly and perversely alleged. Truth it is: a man's face cannot be seen so well in a water as in a faire glass: neither can it be shewed so clearly in a water that is stirred or moved as in a still water. These and many other dark places of scripture have been sore stirred and mixed with blind and covetous opinions of men, which have cast such a mist afore the eyes of the simple, that as long as they be not conferred with the other places of scripture, they shall not seem otherwise to be understood than as covetousness expoundeth them. But whosoever thou be that readest scripture, let the Holy Ghost be thy teacher, and let one text expound another unto thee. As for such dreams, visions and dark sentences as be hid from thy understanding, commit them unto God, and make no articles of them.⁷ But let the plain text be thy guide, and the Spirit of God (which is the author thereof) shall lead thee in all truth.

As for the prayer of Salomon (which thou findest not herein), the prayer of Azarias, and the sweet song that he and his two fellows sang in the fire, the first (namely the prayer of Salomon) readest thou in the eighth chapter of the third book of the Kings,⁸ so that it appeareth not to be Apocryphum: the other prayer and song (namely of the three children) have I not found among any of the interpreters, but only in the old Latin text,⁹ which reporteth it to be of Theodotion's translation.¹⁰ Nevertheless, both because of those that be weak and scrupulous, and for their sakes also that love such sweet songs of thanksgiving, I have not left them out: to the intent that the one should have no cause to complain, and that the other might have the more occasion to give thanks unto God in adversity, as the three children did in the fire. Grace be with thee. Amen.

Despite his fondness for ungainly compounds, Coverdale's style is racy and idiomatic. It is to Coverdale that we owe such colloquial expressions as “Good luck have thou with thine honour” (Ps. 45:5) and “Tush, say they, how should God perceive it?” (Ps. 73:11).¹¹ Indeed, he tends to overdo the use of “Tush”, inserting it for the sake of vividness where the original gives no warrant for it, as in 1 Thess. 5:3, “For whan they shal saye: Tush, It is peace, there is no daunger, then shall soden destruccion come upon them.”

In an impressive number of places it is Coverdale's wording that has survived in successive versions of the English Bible. It is to him that we owe the “lordly dish” in which Jael brought forth butter to Sisera (Judges 5:25), and “enter thou into the joy of thy lord” in the master's commendation of his faithful stewards in the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:21, 23). On the other hand, a number of his renderings have become immortal for their quaintness, such as “there is no more triacle at Galaad” (Jer. 8:22) and “thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night” (Ps. 91:5)—although we should realize that “treacle” and “bugs” had a different meaning for Coverdale's contemporaries from what they have for us. Even in his book titles he can strike out on a line of his own, as when he calls the Song of Songs “Salomons Balettes”.

SAMPLE PASSAGES FROM COVERDALE'S BIBLE

The Lord's Prayer in Coverdale's version runs as follows:

O oure father which art in heauen, halowed be thy name. Thy kyngdome come. Thy wyll be fulfilled vpon earth as it is in heauen. Geue vs this daye oure dayly bred. And forgeue vs oure dettes, as we also forgeue oure detters. And lede vs not in to temptacion: but delyuer vs from euell. For thyne is the kyngdome, and the power, and the glorye for euer. Amen.

This rendering does not differ markedly from Tyndale's, except in the petition for forgiveness. It is from Coverdale that the A.V. of Matt. 6:12 has derived the wording, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”; the more familiar liturgical form, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”, is essentially Tyndale's rendering.

Coverdale renders the parable of the Good Samaritan thus:

A certayne man wente downe from Ierusalem vnto Iericho, and fell amonge murthurers, which stryped him out of his clothes, and wounded him, and wente their waye, and left him half deed. And by chaunce there came downe a prest the same waye: and whan he sawe him, he passed by. And likewyse a Leuite, whan he came nye vnto the same place and sawe him, he passed by. But a Samaritane was goynge his iourney, and came that waye, and whan he sawe him, he had compassion vpon him, wente vnto him, bounde vp his woundes, and poured oyle and wyne therin, and lifte him vp vpon his beast, and brought him in to the ynne, and made prouysion for him. Vpon the next daye whan he departed, he toke out two pens, and gaue them to the oost, and sayde vnto him: Take cure of him, and what so euer thou spendest more, I will paye it the, whan I come agayne. Which of these thre now thinkest thou, was neghboure vnto him, that fell amonge the murtherers? He sayde: He that shewed mercy vpon him. Then sayde Iesus vnto him: Go thy waye then, and do thou likewyse.

Here too Coverdale for the most part follows Tyndale; his main deviation is the substitution of “murderers” for “thieves”, and this is an obvious instance of the influence of the German Bible, according to which the Jericho-bound traveller “fiel unter die Mörder”. Later sixteenth-century versions, and the A.V., preferred “thieves”, which indeed goes back to the Wycliffite versions. The Greek word really means “brigands” or “bandits”.

And this is the rendering of Heb. 1:1-4 in Coverdale's Bible:

God in tyme past dyuersly and many wayes, spake vnto the fathers by prophetes, but in these last dayes he hath spoken vnto vs by his sonne, whom he hath made heyre of all thinges, by whom also he made the worlde. Which (sonne) beynge the brightnes of his glory, and the very ymage of his substaunce, bearinge vp all thinges with the worde of his power, hath in his owne personne pourged oure synnes, and is set on the right hande of the maiestie on hye: beynge euen as moch more excellent then the angels, as he hath optayned a more excellent name then they.

This is little more than a transcript of Tyndale, the main deviation being the omission of the phrase “by inheritance” before “obtained” in the last clause. Here, as we have noticed above, the A.V. (with the other principal versions of the English Bible between 1535 and 1611) reverts to Tyndale's fuller rendering.

ANNE BOLEYN AND COVERDALE'S BIBLE

Even if Coverdale did not expressly and publicly acknowledge his indebtedness to Luther and Tyndale, the “Lutheran” affinities of his version were plain to see, and this explains why some church authorities in England were lukewarm towards it, and others positively hostile to it. Among those who are said to have shown their hostility to it was John Stokesley, who had become Bishop of London when Cuthbert Tonstall was translated to the see of Durham. Why then should so energetic an opponent of Lutheranism as King Henry have taken such a tolerant line with it? The answer may be found in the influence exercised over him by Queen Anne Boleyn, until her fall from favour and execution in May 1536. The queen certainly manifested a keen interest in Coverdale's version, and but for her sad fate, this version might have been approved before long for setting up in the parish churches of England. But with her death, Coverdale's Bible ceased to play any major part in English life, although it was reprinted twice in 1537, once in 1550, and once again in 1553.

MATTHEW'S BIBLE AND THE ROYAL LICENCE

In 1537 there appeared a folio volume bearing the title The Byble, which is all the holy Scripture: in whych are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament, truly and purely translated into Englysh by Thomas Matthew. “Thomas Matthew” is best regarded as a pen-name; the editor was one John Rogers, a former associate of Tyndale's, who later was the first of the Marian martyrs to be burned at the stake in 1555. But the most interesting feature of the title-page of this volume is not the title itself, but the words at the bottom of the page: “Set forth with the kinges most gracyous lycence.”

We have seen how Archbishop Cranmer, two or three years previously, had begun to superintend a revision of the English Bible which it was hoped might circulate with royal authority. But he evidently had little hope of a speedy completion of this work, for when Matthew's Bible appeared—thanks to the generosity of two London merchants and printers, who financed its production—Cranmer wrote to Thomas Cromwell urging him to use his influence with the king to obtain the royal licence for this new version, permitting it to “be sold and read of every person, without danger of any act, proclamation or ordinance heretofore granted to the contrary, until such time that we, the bishops, shall set forth a better translation, which I think will not be till a day after doomsday”.

The royal licence was procured, not only for Matthew's Bible, but also for the second 1537 edition of Coverdale's Bible, which bears on its title-page the words: “Set forth with the kinges most gracyous licence”. Both the 1537 editions of Coverdale's Bible were printed in England by James Nicholson of Southwark, the earlier one being a folio and the latter a quarto. Nicholson's folio, incidentally, has the distinction of being the first edition of the whole English Bible to be printed in England.¹² It may be that Nicholson had some idea of printing Matthew's Bible as well (its first printing was probably in Antwerp); Cromwell forbade him to do so, by way of protecting the rights of the original printer, but consoled him by obtaining the royal licence for his next reprint of Coverdale's Bible, which came out without delay before the end of the year.

So now two versions of the Bible in English were circulating freely in England, by formal and avowed permission of the king, in the year after Tyndale's death.

MATTHEW'S BIBLE MAINLY TYNDALE'S

But what was Matthew's Bible? On examination it is seen to be substantially Tyndale's Pentateuch, Tyndale's version of the historical books of the Old Testament as far as 2 Chronicles, which he had completed in manuscript but never got into print, Coverdale's version of the other Old Testament books and Apocrypha, and Tyndale's New Testament of 1535. It was a signal act of justice—ordinary justice and poetic justice too—that the first English Bible to be published under royal licence should be Tyndale's Bible (so far as Tyndale's translation had reached), even if it was not yet advisable to associate Tyndale's name with it publicly.

On the other hand John Rogers, who edited this edition of the Bible, would not associate his own name with it; it was not his translation, althogh he may well have assisted Tyndale in the translation of the books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles and in the production of his 1535 New Testament. If the manuscript of the translation from Joshua to 2 Chronicles remained in his custody after Tyndale's arrest, then he would regard it as his duty to publish it as soon as possible. The initials “W.T.” appear at the end of Malachi, as though to indicate to the discerning that W.T. was the chief (although not the sole) author of the Old Testament translation. As for the pen-name Thomas Matthew, we cannot be sure what suggested it to Rogers' mind; it may, as Dr Mozley says, have been “some quite trivial thing”. Nor should we say that Thomas Matthew is John Rogers' own pen-name; “rather Matthew stands for Tyndale plus Coverdale plus (to a very small degree) Rogers.”¹³

The preliminary pages of the Matthew Bible contained a church calendar and almanac, a collection of biblical passages constituting “An Exhortation to the Study of the Holy Scripture”, a summary of the chief doctrines contained in the Bible, adapted from Jacques Lefèvre's French Bible of 1534, a dedication to King Henry, an alphabetic concordance to the subjects dealt with in the Bible, translated from Pierre Robert Olivetan's French Bible of 1535, as is also a following preface “to the Christian reader”. Then comes a list of the books of the Bible and a chronological table.

As in Coverdale's Bible, the books of the Apocrypha were placed by themselves in an appendix to the Old Testament. It was in the Matthew Bible that the apocryphal “Prayer of Manasseh” was first published in English: it was translated from the French of Olivetan's Bible.

In the New Testament the order of books is the same as in Luther's and Tyndale's versions, with Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation at the end. Tyndale's prologue to the Epistle to the Romans is reprinted, and so (at the end of the New Testament) is Tyndale's table of liturgical epistles and gospels according to the Sarum use.

The text of Matthew's Bible is copiously equipped with notes and parallel references; these are largely borrowed from the French versions of Lefèvre and Olivetan. The actual renderings of these French versions have also influenced Matthew's text here and there.

THE GREAT BIBLE

THE BIBLE IN CHURCH

With two versions of the English Bible now fortified by the royal licence, there was no obstacle to its circulation throughout the land. Many bishops, even some who were by no means friendly to the principles of the Reformation, encouraged their clergy to possess and study the English Bible. Some went further than that: Nicolas Shaxton, bishop of Salisbury, required his clergy, early in 1538, to see to it that by Whit Sunday of that year an English Bible should be chained to the desk in every parish church throughout the diocese, in order that literate parishioners might read, and illiterate ones hear, “wholesome doctrine and comfort to their souls”. All these measures had the support of Cromwell, and indeed of the king himself. No particular edition of the English Bible was specified in these injunctions, but while some would prefer Coverdale's quarto edition as being cheaper, others would prefer Matthew's folio edition as being more legible—and it was certainly the more convenient edition for chaining to church desks. But the outspoken Protestantism of its notes and other accessories did not commend itself to the more conservative bishops and clergy, and it was decided—apparently by Cromwell—that a revision of the Matthew Bible should be undertaken to render it more generally acceptable. The work of revision was entrusted to Coverdale, and the printing began in Paris about May 1538. This was the genesis of what came to be known as the Great Bible.

As early as the summer of 1536 Cromwell had entertained the idea of having a copy of the English Bible made publicly accessible in every parish church in England, and an injunction to this effect was actually printed, but withdrawn for political reasons before it was issued. Two years later, however, the situation was much more favourable, and the injunction was taken out of cold storage and published in the king's name on September 5, 1538. It charged the clergy:

That ye shall provide, on this side the feast of All Saints next coming, one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English, and the same set up in some convenient place within the said church that ye have cure of, whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it; the charges of which book shall be rateably borne between you, the parson, and the parishioners aforesaid, that is to say, the one half by you and the other half by them.

Item, that ye shall discourage no man privily or apertly from the reading or hearing of the said Bible, but shall expressly provoke, stir and exhort every person to read the same, as that which is the very lively Word of God, that every Christian person is bound to embrace, believe, and follow, if he look to be saved; admonishing them nevertheless to avoid all contention and altercation therein, but to use an honest sobriety in their inquisition of the true sense of the same, and to refer the explication of obscure places to men of higher judgment in scripture.

What was meant by “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English”? Cromwell doubtless had the Great Bible in mind; it was being printed in Paris for the very purpose specified in the injunction. But there was little likelihood that the Great Bible would be ready by the beginning of November, and in that case those clergy who were anxious to obey the injunction to the letter had no option but to procure a copy of Matthew's Bible, which (at the time when the injunction was published) was unquestionably the “Bible of the largest volume in English”. There is no lack of evidence that, before the first edition of the Great Bible could have been generally available for placing in parish churches, the Bible was being avidly read in many of them, so much so that the king found it necessary to issue a proclamation (towards the end of April 1539) forbidding the reading of the English Bible aloud in church during divine service. Evidently, even while divine service was going on, there were many people who found it much more interesting, and possibly more edifying as well, to listen to the Bible being read by one of their literate fellow-parishioners than to listen to what the parson was saying. Archbishop Cranmer, for all his good will to the free circulation of the English Bible, had to make it clear that the injunction of September 1538 was never intended to permit divine service to be interrupted by unauthorized reading of the Bible, or to permit all and sundry to make its reading (during service or at any other time) an occasion for public exposition of the sacred text by people not duly qualified.

The printing of the Great Bible was delayed by the action of the French inquisitor-general at the end of 1538. He forbade the printers to continue with their work, and the sheets already printed were confiscated. Diplomatic representations were made at the French court, and permission was granted to transport the type, paper and printers to England so that the printing could be done there, but the confiscated sheets were not released. Practically all the Bible apart from the Apocrypha had been printed, so that most of the work had to be done over again. The Great Bible at length made its first appearance in April 1539.

TAVERNER'S BIBLE

Probably a short time before the appearance of the Great Bible, another revision of Matthew's Bible was published in England. The reviser was a layman called Richard Taverner. He was a good Greek scholar, and the main feature of his revision is the improvement of the New Testament from the standpoint of Greek scholarship, special attention being paid to the accurate rendering of the Greek definite article. Taverner's Bible was almost immediately eclipsed by the Great Bible, and had but little influence on subsequent versions of the English Bible; one notable phrase with which it provided the A.V. comes in Heb. 1:3, where the Son of God is called the “express image” of His person.

THE GREAT BIBLE

The Great Bible of 1539 bears the title: “The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy scripture, both of the olde and newe testament, truly translated after the veryte of the Hebrue and Greke textes, by the dylygent studye of dyuerse excellent learned men, expert in the foresayde tonges. Prynted by Rychard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum.¹⁴ 1539.” This title is surrounded by a woodcut (which was formerly ascribed to Holbein, on no sufficient grounds), in which King Henry from his throne delivers the Word of God with his right hand to Cranmer and with his left to Cromwell, while Cranmer and Cromwell in their turn deliver it to the clergy and laity respectively. Below a motley crowd of men, women and children cry “God save the king”, while the Almighty Father looks down approvingly on the whole scene, proclaiming “My word that goeth forth out of my mouth shall not return to me void, but shall accomplish that which I please” (Isa. 55:11) and “I have found a man after my own heart, who shall perform all my desire” (Acts 13:22).

Although the title of the Great Bible suggests that it was the product of consultation between “divers excellent learned men”, it was actually Coverdale's revision of Matthew's Bible. In other words, it was Coverdale's revision of John Rogers' revision of Tyndale's Bible, so far as Tyndale's Bible went. The “divers excellent learned men” are simply the translators, editors and other scholars whose works Coverdale consulted.

Coverdale did not remain content with the first edition of the Great Bible; he continued his work of revision, and when the second edition appeared in April 1540 it represented a considerable advance over the first edition in the matter of revision, especially in the poetical sections of the Old Testament. This second edition contains a preface by Cranmer, which was reprinted in subsequent editions of the Great Bible; and it has the added words at the foot of the title-page: “This is the Byble apoynted to the use of the churches”. These added words made explicit what was intended from the first, that the injunction of 1538 commanding that an English Bible be set up in every parish church envisaged the Great Bible as the one to be used in this way. Five further editions were published between July 1540 and December 1541.

CRANMER'S PREFACE

The Great Bible (from the second edition onwards) is sometimes called “Cranmer's Bible” because of the preface which he wrote for it. In this preface he commended the widespread reading of the Scriptures, and appealed to the authority of the ancient fathers, Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus, in support of his plea that the Bible was the sufficient rule of faith and life:

Here may all manner of persons: men, women; young, old; learned, unlearned; rich, poor; priests, laymen; lords, ladies; officers, tenants, and mean men; virgins, wives, widows; lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be; may in THIS BOOK learn all things, what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, and what they should not do, as well concerning Almighty God, as also concerning themselves, and all others.

A NEW TITLE-PAGE

The woodcut around the title continued to be reproduced in edition after edition of the Great Bible, but after Thomas Cromwell's rapid fall from favour in 1540 his arms were removed from it. In the fourth and sixth editions (November 1540 and November 1541) the title is completely rewritten, and appears as follows:

The Byble in Englishe of the largest and greatest volume, auctoryed and apoynted by the commandemente of our moost redoubted Prynce and soueraygne Lorde Kynge Henry the VIII., supreme heade of this his churche and realme of Englande: to be frequented and used in every churche in this his sayd realme, accordynge to the tenour of his former Injunctions giuen in that behalfe.

Oversene and perused at the commaundment of the Kynge's Hyghnes, by the ryghte reuerende fathers in God Cuthbert Bysshop of Duresme, and Nicolas Bisshop of Rochester. Printed by Edward Whitchurch. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum.

This makes the former direction, “This is the Byble apoynted to the use of the churches”, more explicit still. But the most striking feature of the new title is the reference to Cuthbert, Bishop of Durham. For this is no other than Cuthbert Tonstall, formerly Bishop of London, to whom Tyndale had applied in vain for facilities to prosecute his work of Bible translation in 1523, and who bought up as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament as he could lay his hands on, in order to burn them at St Paul's Cross. Now he appears as lending the authority of his high office to a Bible translation which is Tyndale's production more than anyone else's! We may suppose that Tonstall knew only too well how far the translation which he had “overseen and perused” was Tyndale's, but “the commandment of the King's Highness” brooked no resistance.

COMPARATIVE QUOTATIONS

[A comparison of passages of the Old Testament from the editions of Coverdale and Matthew and the Great Bible] makes it abundantly plain that, although Coverdale had produced a version of his own in 1535, it was not that version but Matthew's (that is to say Tyndale's) that he used as the basis for the Great Bible for the first half of the Old Testament. For the second half of the Old Testament (from Ezra to Malachi) and for the Apocrypha, of course, Tyndale was not available, and since Matthew's Bible had followed Coverdale in these books, they showed much less divergence as between Coverdale's Bible and the Great Bible. Thus, in Coverdale's Bible and the Great Bible alike Hezekiah shows the king of Babylon's messengers “all that was in his cubburdes” (Isa. 39:2; A.V. “… treasures”), and the divine oracle to Zerubbabel promises that “he shall brynge up the fyrst stone, so that men shal crye unto hym, Good lucke, good lucke” (Zech. 4:7; A.V. “he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it”). And both have the same perversion of the sense in Malachi 2:16, “Yf thou hatest her put her awaye, sayeth the Lord God of Israel, and geue her a clothinge for the scorne, sayeth the Lorde of hoostes” (A.V., “For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the Lord of hosts”).

In other places in the second half of the Old Testament, however, the Great Bible represents a correction of Coverdale's Bible. Thus Coverdale had rendered Eccl. 12:12, “Therefore, beware (my sonne) that aboue these thou make the not many and innumerable bokes, nor take dyuerse doctrynes in hande, to weery thy body withal.” But the Great Bible says: “Therefore, beware (my sonne) of that doctryne that is besyde thys: for, to make many bokes it is an endlesse worke; and too loude criynge weryeth the bodye.” This last version is nearer the sense of the passage (cf. A.V., “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh”), except for the “too loud crying” in the last clause; there the 1535 version was better. Second thoughts are not always wiser, as may appear further in Psalm 77:2. Here Coverdale's 1535 Bible said: “In the tyme of my trouble I sought the Lorde, I helde vp my hondes vnto him in the night season, for my soule refused all other comforte.” But in the Great Bible he changed “I held up my hands unto him in the night season” to “my sore ran and ceased not in the night season” (cf. Prayer Book Version); and this correction was taken over by the Geneva Bible of 1560 and by the A.V. But the literal rendering of the Hebrew supports Coverdale's first version, as may be seen from the R.V. (“My hand was stretched out in the night, and slacked not”) and R.S.V. (“in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying”).

NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES

A few samples may now be given of the New Testament rendering of the Great Bible. Here is the Lord's Prayer, from Matt. 6:9-13:

Oure father which art in heauen, halowed be thy name. Let thy kingdome come. Thy will be fulfilled, as well in erth, as it is in heuen. Geue vs this daye oure dayly bred. And forgeue vs oure dettes, as we forgeue oure detters. And leade vs not into temptation: but delyuer vs from euyll. For thyne is the kyngdom and the power, and the glorye for euer. Amen.

Here the Great Bible has followed Coverdale's “forgeue vs oure dettes, as we also forgeue oure detters” instead of Tyndale's “forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them whych treaspas vs”. “Debts” and “debtors” are certainly the literal equivalents of the Greek terms found in Matt. 6:12, but these Greek terms go back to the original language used by Jesus—Aramaic—in which the words meaning “debts” and “debtors” were used idiomatically in the sense of “sins” and “sinners”. What Jesus really taught His disciples to pray was: “forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is rendered thus in the Great Bible:

A certayne man descended from Hierusalem to Hierico, and fell among theues, whych robbed him of hys rayment and wounded hym, and departed, leauynge hym halfe deed. And it chaunced, that ther came downe a certayne Preste that same waye: and when he sawe him, he passed by. And lyke wyse a Leuite, when he went nye to the place, came and loked on him, and passed by. But a certayne Samaritane, as he iorneyed, came vnto hym: and when he sawe hym, he had compassyon on hym: and went to, and bounde vp his woundes, and poured in oyle and wyne, and set hym on his awne beaste, and brought hym to a commen ynne, and made prouisyon for him. And on the morow, when he departed, he toke out two pence, and gaue them to the host, and sayd vnto him: Take cure of him, and whatsoeuer thou spendest moare, when I come agayne I will recompence the. Whych now of these thre thynkest thou, was neyghbour vnto hym that fell among the theues? And he sayde: he that shewed mercy on hym. Then sayde Iesus vnto hym: Go, and do thou lyke wyse.

Here Coverdale has abandoned his 1535 rendering “murderers”, preferring Tyndale's “thieves”.

The opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the Great Bible follow Tyndale's rendering closely:

God in tyme past diuersly and many wayes, spake vnto the fathers by Prophetes: but in these last dayes he hath spoken vnto vs by hys awne sonne, whom he hath made heyre of all thinges by whom also he made the worlde. Whych (sonne) beinge the brightnes of hys glory, and the very ymage of hys substance rulynge all thynges wyth the worde of hys power, hath by his awne person pourged oure synnes, and sytteth on the right hande of the maiestye on hye: beynge so moch more excellent then the angels, as he hath by inherytaunce obteyned a more excellent name then they.

In the last clause Coverdale has reinserted Tyndale's “by inheritance” before “obtained” (he omitted it, as we have seen, in his own edition of 1535), and by retaining his change of Tyndale's “excellenter” to “more excellent” he has given this clause, in the Great Bible, the exact form in which it was later perpetuated in the A.V.

OTHER FEATURES OF THE GREAT BIBLE

A few notes were retained in the Great Bible, but only such as might make the meaning of certain words and expressions plainer to the reader; the controversial notes of Matthew's Bible were dropped. A number of marginal signs and the like (principally in the form of pointing hands) appeared in the earlier editions of the Great Bible; these were intended to draw the reader's attention to an appendix of “certain godly annotations” by Coverdale himself. This appendix, however, although it was probably compiled, was never published; even if Coverdale's “godly annotations” were couched in the most moderate language, they could not but express his Lutheran views, which would have been objectionable to many of the clergy, not to mention the king himself.

In the title-page to the Apocrypha these books are mistakenly referred to as the “Hagiographa” (i.e. “holy writings”)—a term which properly denotes those canonical books of the Old Testament which are not included in the Law or the Prophets.

In the New Testament the Lutheran order of the books (followed by Tyndale, Matthew, and Coverdale himself in his 1535 Bible), which places Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation at the end in a category by themselves, is discontinued; the order adopted in the Great Bible is that given by Erasmus in his Greek Testament, and followed by the A.V. and other principal English versions after 1539.

YEARS OF REACTION

The closing years of the reign of Henry VIII were years of reaction so far as the Reforming movement was concerned. This had an effect in various ways upon the fortunes of the English Bible. For example, in the spring of 1543 Parliament passed an act “for the advancement of true religion and for the abolishment of the contrary”, which banned “the crafty, false and untrue translation of Tyndale”, made it a crime for any unlicensed person to read or expound the Bible publicly to others, and went so far as to forbid even the private reading of the Bible by people belonging to the lower classes of society. It is to the period following this enactment that the famous inscription of the Gloucestershire shepherd Robert Williams belongs. Robert Williams belonged to those categories of Englishmen who were forbidden to read the English Bible for themselves; yet he was so literate and cultured a man that when Thomas Langley's Abridgement of Polydore Vergil¹⁶ appeared in 1546 he bought a copy for himself, and wrote in it:

At Oxforde the yere 1546 browt down to Seynbury by John Darbye pryse-14d when I kepe Mr Letymers shype I bout thys boke when the testament was obberagatyd that shepe herdys myght not red hit I prey God amende that blyndnes. Wryt by Robert Wyllyams keppynge shepe uppon Seynbury hill 1546.

It was in this year 1546 that a proclamation by King Henry himself went further even than the Act of Parliament of 1543. It ordained that after the last day of August in that year “no man or woman, of what estate, condition, or degree, was … to receive, have, take, or keep, Tyndale's or Coverdale's New Testament.” In the diocese of London large quantities not only of Tyndale's and Coverdale's New Testaments but of their Old Testament translations as well were collected and burned at St Paul's Cross. Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, was a protagonist of the conservative reaction.

The ban on the Bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale was a monumental piece of absurdity, when all the time the Great Bible maintained its prominent position in every parish church in the land. To be sure, the Great Bible itself was not immune from attack; the Upper House of Convocation of Canterbury in 1542 decided that the Great Bible could not be retained as the authorized version of the realm “without scandal and error and open offence to Christ's faithful people” unless it were revised and corrected in conformity with the Latin Vulgate. The work of revision and correction of the two Testaments was entrusted to two committees of bishops, each committee including a representative from the Province of York. But the work came to nothing; the king suddenly decided that it should be undertaken by the two Universities and not by the bishops, and the Universities do not appear to have done anything about it. We cannot be sorry that the work came to nothing; a revision which rendered the heavenly voice at our Lord's baptism as “This is my dilect son in whom complacui” (for this is how Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, would have worded it) could scarcely have commended itself to English readers. One member of the Convocation of Canterbury who shed no tears over the failure of the scheme was the archbishop himself. Cranmer would not have denied that the Great Bible was capable of improvement, but such a revision as it was in a fair way to receive from his more conservative colleagues in the 1540's would not have been an improvement in his eyes.

Thus, when King Henry died on January 28, 1547, the Great Bible was still the version “appointed to the use of the churches” throughout England.

THE ELIZABETHAN BIBLE

THE ENGLISH PRAYER BOOK

With the accession of Edward VI the reactionary swing of his father's closing years was reversed; the Reforming movement was now in the ascendant. The first year of the new reign saw a repromulgation of the royal injunction of 1538, ordering that within three months from July 31 “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” should be installed in every parish church. This repromulgation was no doubt necessary because during the preceding years many church Bibles had been removed or allowed to fall into disrepair. The injunction of 1538 had not been abrogated, but the trend of those latter years was not favourable to its full observance, in letter or in spirit. The Great Bible was reprinted twice under Edward VI—in 1549 and again in 1553. The former of these two years witnessed another notable event in the religious literature of England—the publication of the first English edition of The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administracion of the Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Churche after the Use of the Churche of England. The English Prayer Book (based essentially on the old use of Sarum) is as much Cranmer's legacy as the English Bible is Tyndale's. A second edition of the Prayer Book followed in 1552. Henceforth (apart from the five years of Mary Tudor's reign) the English people were to hear their church services in their own language. In the first year of Edward VI a royal injunction laid it down that the Epistle and Gospel in the Communion Service should be read in English. But now all the services for the general public were to be conducted in the common tongue, and that included all the passages of Scripture which were incorporated in them. The whole Psalter was to be gone through each month; the Great Bible version of the Psalms, first used for this purpose in 1549, was printed in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and has been retained ever since. Not only so, but provision was made for the reading of a chapter from both Testaments daily at Mattins and Evensong, so that practically the whole Bible was read through publicly year by year. In 1543 an order had been given that a chapter of the New Testament in English should be read at Mattins after the Te Deum and at Evensong after the Magnificat; but the new Bible-reading provision of Cranmer and his associates, in the context of the liturgy, endeavoured to embody the ideal “of the primitive and early Church, a ministry of word and sacrament intimately conjoined Sunday by Sunday, a Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ shared by all, and side by side with it a daily office in which the scriptures read and the Psalms said or sung in unbroken course should build men up in the faith.”¹⁷

CHEKE'S VERSION

In 1550 a novel attempt at Bible translation was begun by Sir John Cheke, formerly Professor of Greek at Cambridge and tutor to Edward VI. His translation represents the opposite extreme to the ultra-latinate version which Bishop Gardiner would have preferred, for as far as possible he aimed at using words of pure English ancestry. “Proselyte”, for example, appears in Cheke's translation as “freshman”; “parable” as “biword”; “resurrection” as “uprising” or even “gainrising”, for he did not scruple to coin compounds to convey the sense of the old-established Greek and Latin compounds. An “apostle” is a frosent, “regeneration” is gainbirth, “superscription” is onwriting, “captivity” is outpeopling, “crucified” is crossed, “lunatic” is moond, “demon-possessed” is devild, “publicans” are tollers, “money-changers” are tablers, the “wise men” are wizards, “foreigners” are Welschmen, the “high priest” is hed bishop, a “centurion” is a hundreder, and so forth. Sir John was not only an original translator, but something of a spelling reformer as well. He completed only St Matthew's Gospel and the beginning of St Mark; his translation remained in manuscript until 1843, when it was published and edited by the Rev. James Goodwin. He did not eschew all words of Latin origin, as appears from his rendering of the “comfortable words” of Matt. 11:25-30:

At that time Jesus answered and said: I must needs, O Father, acknowledge thanks unto thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, which hast hidden these things from wise and witty men, and hast disclosed the same to babes; yea and that, Father, for such was thy good pleasure herein. All things be delivered me of my Father. And no man knoweth the Son but the Father,¹⁸ and he to whom the Son will disclose it. Come to me all that labour and be burdened and I will ease you. Take my yoke on you and learn of me, for I am mild and of a lowly heart. And ye shall find quietness for your selves. For my yoke is profitable and my burden light.

Here the words “disclosed”, “pleasure”, “delivered”, “labour”, “quietness” and “profitable” are of Latin origin, but probably Sir John regarded them as adequately naturalized in the English language.

BISHOP BECKE'S BIBLE

What is sometimes called “Bishop Becke's Bible”, published in 1551, consists essentially of Taverner's Old Testament and Tyndale's New Testament, compiled by John Daye and revised and edited by Edmund Becke. Becke added a translation of 3 Maccabees, and retranslated 1 Esdras, Tobit and Judith. This edition was furnished with a dedication to the young king, instructing him in the duties of his high station. If people would only devote an hour a day to reading the Bible, says the dedication, they would soon give up blasphemy, swearing, card-playing and other games of chance, together with pride, prodigality, riot, licentiousness and all kinds of dissolute living.

Becke's Bible was amply annotated, the annotations being set in the same type as the sacred text. These were felt to be objectionable, and were not reprinted; the most frequently cited note being that on 1 Peter 3:7, where men are exhorted to live with their wives “according to knowledge”.

He dwelleth wyth his wyfe according to knowledge, that taketh her as a necessary healper, and not as a bonde servante, or a bonde slave. And yf she be not obedient and healpful unto hym, endeavoureth to beate the feare of God into her heade, that thereby she maye be compelled to learne her dutie, and to do it.

One wonders if the editor penned the second part of this note with his tongue in his cheek; even if he did, it is better not to indulge one's sense of humour in Bible annotations, for readers are predisposed to treat all Bible annotations seriously!

THE MARIAN REACTION

With the accession of Mary in 1553 the Reforming policy of her brother's reign was reversed. Some of the men most closely associated with the work of Bible translation, like John Rogers and Thomas Cranmer, were executed; others, like Coverdale, found safety on the Continent. But no express steps were taken against the English Bible. The injunction of 1538, ordering the setting up of the Great Bible in parish churches, was not revoked. The queen's first Parliament enacted that church services should be conducted as they had been in the last year of Henry VIII; but in the last year of Henry VIII the Great Bible was still to be seen in a large number of parish churches. And in Mary's last year, a Reformer by the name of Roger Holland appeared before Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, with the English New Testament in his hand, and said: “You will find no fault with the translation, I think; it is of your own translation, it is according to the Great Bible.” For Bonner, who occupied the see of London under Henry VIII and Edward VI (from 1539 to 1549), and again under Mary, had been foremost in having the Great Bible set up in the churches of his diocese when it appeared in 1539. And now he did not find any fault with the translation, but contented himself with arguing that Holland or anybody else could not know it to be Christ's Testament apart from the Church's authority.

There was, indeed, much burning of Bibles during Mary's reign, as Foxe's martyrologies show, but the position of the Great Bible, at any rate, does not appear to have been assailed either by act of Parliament or by royal proclamation. The queen herself, during her father's reign, had been associated with the Great Bible, when the English translation of Erasmus's paraphrase of St John's Gospel, which she prepared in collaboration with her chaplain, was bound up with the Great Bible and placed in churches along with it. “Is it possible,” asks Dr J. F. Mozley, “that the queen nourished in her heart a certain tenderness for that version to whose elucidation she had contributed, and that this in part accounts for her unwillingness to condemn by proclamation the English bible?”¹⁹

THE GREAT BIBLE AT ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION

When Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth, one of the earliest injunctions of the new queen repeated the order of her father and brother that “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” should be procured and set up in every parish church within three months. As at the beginning of the reign of Edward VI, it was not necessary to obtain a new Bible if the old one was still available and serviceable, but there were many churches where the Bible was no longer available, or if available was too dilapidated to be of any use. Evidently the 1553 edition of the Great Bible had not been exhausted—it was printed only a short time before Mary's accession, and it would not have been a best-seller during her reign—but it had not been confiscated or destroyed, for there is good documentary evidence for the purchase of copies in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, and it was not necessary to print a fresh folio edition until 1562. But the Great Bible had served its generation well, and thirty years after its publication in 1539 it had been superseded by a better version.

WHITTINGHAM'S NEW TESTAMENT

While England saw no activity in the work of Bible translation during Mary's reign, there were Englishmen elsewhere who were convinced of the need for a better translation than had been attained thus far, and they gave themselves to the task of producing one. Coverdale was not the only English Reformer who found a congenial home in Geneva at this time, in the city where John Knox thought he had found “the most perfect school of Christ” since apostolic days. Here was a most favourable setting for the work of Bible study and translation. The city's most illustrious inhabitants in those years was John Calvin, the leading theologian of the Reformation, whose talents were laid out to greatest advantage in his commentaries on the books of the Bible. Another leading Reformer who had close associations with Geneva was Theodore Beza, the greatest biblical scholar of his day. He and others had contributed greatly to the better establishment and elucidation of the biblical text, and the English exiles found a group of Frenchmen in Geneva engaged on a revision of the French Bible in the light of the expert knowledge which was available there. The English exiles followed their example, under the leadership of William Whittingham, sometime Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who married Calvin's sister (or sister-in-law), and succeeded John Knox as pastor of the English church in Geneva. In 1557 Whittingham produced a revision of the English New Testament—substantially Matthew's edition of Tyndale, with some changes introduced from the Great Bible, and others based on Beza's Latin New Testament of 1556. Whittingham's was a small octavo edition, in roman type (except for words added to make the sense plain, which were set in a different type), and with the text divided into verses.²⁰ One notable feature of its wording is the use of “church” to render Greek ekklesia, instead of “congregation”, which Tyndale and Coverdale had favoured. It contained an introductory epistle by Calvin, “declaring that Christ is the end of the law”, and a preface “To the Reader”, in which the principles of the revision are explained. The name of Paul does not appear in the title of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and a note points out that “seeing the Spirit of God is the author thereof, it diminishes nothing the authority, although we know not with what pen he wrote it.” It is in this edition, too, that the Epistles of James, Peter, 1 John and Jude are first called the “General Epistles” (as in A.V. and R.V.) rather than “Catholic Epistles” (as in the earlier English versions, following the Vulgate).

THE GENEVA BIBLE

But Whittingham's New Testament was only an interim edition; he and his associates had something more ambitious in mind. They continued to work on the New Testament, and paid attention to the Old Testament as well, until the fruit of their labours appeared in 1560 in the version known as the Geneva Bible. The title-page of this new version ran thus:

The Bible and Holy Scriptures. Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Translated according to the Ebrue and Greke, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages. With most profitable annotations upon all the hard places, and other things of greate importance as may appeare in the Epistle to the Reader. “Feare not, stand stil, and beholde the salvacion of the Lord, which he wil shewe to you this day,” Exod. xiv. 13. At Geneva. Printed by Rowland Hall. M.D.LX.

After a list of the books of the Old and New Testaments comes a dedicatory epistle to Queen Elizabeth.

The eyes of all that fear God in all places behold your countries as an example to all that believe, and the prayers of all the godly at all times are directed to God for the preservation of Your Majesty. For considering God's wonderful mercies toward you at all seasons, who hath pulled you out of the mouth of the lions, and how that from your youth you have been brought up in the holy scriptures, the hope of all men is so increased, that they cannot but look that God should bring to pass some wonderful work by your grace to the universal comfort of his Church. Therefore even above strength you must shew yourself strong and bold in God's matters. … This Lord of lords and King of kings who hath ever defended his, strengthen, comfort and preserve Your Majesty, that you may be able to build up the ruins of God's house to his glory, the discharge of your conscience, and to the comfort of all them that love the coming of Christ Jesus our Lord.

For her work as a builder up of “the ruins of God's house” the queen is compared to Zerubbabel, the rebuilder of the Jerusalem temple after the Babylonian captivity. As he had his enemies, so she has hers (“whereof some are Papists … who traitorously seek to erect idolatry”); but by faith in God and the paying of heed to His ministers she, like Zerubbabel, will have good success.

The address to the queen is followed by one to the readers, among whom all the English-speaking nations of the day are included.

To our Beloved in the Lord, the Brethren of England, Scotland, Ireland, etc. Grace, mercy and peace, through Christ Jesus …

The translators explain why earlier versions of the English Bible need to be revised, and continue:

Not that we vindicate anything to ourselves above the least of our brethren (for God knoweth with what fear and trembling we have been now for the space of two years and more, day and night, occupied herein), but being earnestly desired, and by divers, whose learning and godliness we reverence, exhorted, and also encouraged by the ready wills of such whose hearts God likewise touched, not to spare any charges for the furtherance of such a benefit and favour of God toward his Church (though the time then was most dangerous and the persecution sharp and furious), we submitted ourselves at length to their godly judgments, and seeing the great opportunity and occasions which God presented unto us in this Church by reason of so many godly and learned men, and such diversities of translations in divers tongues, we undertook this great and wonderful work (with all reverence, as in the presence of God, as entreating the word of God, whereunto we think ourselves insufficient), which now God, according to his divine providence and mercy, hath directed to a most prosperous end. And this we may with good conscience protest, that we have in every point and word, according to the measure of that knowledge which it pleased Almighty God to give us, faithfully rendered the text, and in all hard places most sincerely expounded the same. For God is our witness that we have by all means endeavoured to set forth the purity of the word and right sense of the Holy Ghost, for the edifying of the brethren in faith and charity.

Evidently the Christian reader of that day was less impatient of long sentences than his modern descendant is!

While the work of translation is ascribed to “many godly and learned men” who found themselves brought together, it is highly probable that Whittingham was foremost among them. One would be interested to know what part in the work was taken by Coverdale, or even (it may be) by Knox. But of greater interest is the way in which they set about their work. In the Old Testament the Geneva Bible represents a thorough revision of the Great Bible, especially in those books which Tyndale had not translated. For these books had never been translated directly into English from Hebrew (or Aramaic). Now the existing version of the prophetical books and the poetical and wisdom literature of the Old Testament was carefully brought into line with the Hebrew text, and even with the Hebrew idiom. Indeed, the translators acknowledge their Hebraizing tendency as regards the whole Bible, New Testament as well as Old, when they say in their address to the reader:

Now as we have chiefly observed the sense, and laboured always to restore it to all integrity, so have we most reverently kept the propriety of the words, considering that the Apostles who spake and wrote to the Gentiles in the Greek tongue, rather constrained them to the lively phrase of the Hebrew, than enterprised far by mollifying their language to speak as the Gentiles did. And for this and other causes we have in many places reserved the Hebrew phrases, notwithstanding that they may seem somewhat hard in their ears that are not well practised and also delight in the sweet sounding phrases of the holy scriptures.

For the New Testament they took as their basis Tyndale's latest edition, and revised it with the aid of Beza's Latin version and his commentary.

The books of the Apocrypha, which (as in Coverdale) appear as an appendix to the Old Testament, are described as “books which were not received by a common consent to be read and expounded publicly in the Church, neither yet served to prove any point of Christian religion save in so much as they had the consent of the other scriptures called canonical to confirm the same, or rather whereon they were grounded: but as books proceeding from godly men, were received to be read for the advancement and furtherance of knowledge of the history and for the instruction of godly manners.”

The translators are careful to point out that certain actions of heroes recorded in the Apocrypha are not necessarily to be imitated. Thus the suicidal acts of Eleazar the Hasmonean (1 Macc. 6:43 ff.) and Razis (2 Macc. 14:41 ff.), it is noted, must not be followed (even although they appear to be recorded with approval) because suicide is contrary to God's commandment, and as for the commendation of prayer for the dead in 2 Macc. 12:44 f., “though Judas [Maccabaeus] had so done, yet this particular example is not sufficient to establish a doctrine. …” But they are equally ready to make it plain that certain actions by pious people in the canonical books are examples to be avoided, not imitated. Thus they point out that the Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1:15 ff. should not have told Pharaoh lies about their inability to strangle Hebrew boys at birth, although they were right to disobey his iniquitous orders; and against the account in 2 Chronicles 15:16 of King Asa's deposition of his mother for her idolatry they set the grim and often quoted comment: “Herein he shewed that he lacked zeal: for she ought to have died … but he gave place to foolish pity.”

The notes of the Geneva Bible are famous, largely because they irritated James I so much; yet they are mild in comparison with Tyndale's. They are, to be sure, unashamedly Calvinistic in doctrine, and therefore offensive to readers who find Calvinism offensive; but for half a century the people of England and Scotland, who read the Geneva Bible in preference to any other version, learned much of their biblical exegesis from these notes. One may surmise that the Geneva Bible, translation and notes together, played no little part in making British Puritanism the strongly vertebrate movement that it was.

One might expect the notes to be outspokenly anti-Roman, and so, of course, they are, but to any marked degree only in the Revelation. The reason for this, no doubt, is that the translators were convinced that the Papacy was the persecuting power portrayed in that book, so that its exposition demanded plain and unfriendly references to Rome. Thus “the beast that cometh out of the bottomless pit” (Rev. 11:7) is “the Pope which hath his power out of hell and cometh thence”; and there are other comments in similar vein.

Like Whittingham's New Testament, the Geneva Bible is divided into verses (the Old Testament verses being taken over from the Hebrew Bible) and words which have no equivalent in the original text are printed in italics (the remainder being in Roman).

The expense of publishing the first edition of the Geneva Bible appears to have been borne by the English-speaking colony in Geneva, and in particular by John Bodley (father of Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian at Oxford). In 1561 Bodley obtained from Queen Elizabeth the exclusive right to print the Geneva Bible for a period of seven years, and in that year he printed a folio edition in Geneva (the first edition had been quarto). In all, some seventy editions of the Geneva Bible and thirty of the New Testament were published during Elizabeth's reign, most of them in England itself.²¹ A revised edition of the Geneva New Testament was produced in 1576 by Lawrence Tomson, secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham (then Elizabeth's Secretary of State); this revision was often printed as the New Testament section of subsequent editions of the Geneva Bible. In 1579 a Scottish edition of the Geneva Bible was published—the first Bible ever to be printed in Scotland—“printed by Alexander Arbuthnot, Printer to the King's Majesty”.

The Geneva Bible immediately won, and retained, widespread popularity. It became the household Bible of English-speaking Protestants. While its notes represented a more radical Reformed viewpoint than that favoured in the Elizabethan religious settlement, and it was never appointed to be used in the churches of England, its excellence as a translation was acknowledged even by those who disagreed with the theology of the translators. At the very time when Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, was pressing ahead with a rival version, the Bishops' Bible, he thought so well of the Geneva Bible that he advocated a twelve years' extension of the exclusive right of printing it granted in 1561 to John Bodley. Even if he and his fellow-bishops were specially interested in the Bishops' Bible, he added, “yet should it nothing hinder but rather do much good to have diversity of translations and readings”—a remarkably enlightened opinion.

In Scotland, the Geneva Bible was from the beginning the version appointed to be read in churches. The Church of Scotland was reformed in the same year as the Geneva Bible first appeared, and it was the most natural thing in the world that John Knox should prefer the version prepared by his friends and fellow-exiles at Geneva, whether or not he himself played a small part in its production. Even after the appearance of the Authorized Version in 1611, the Geneva Bible held its own for a considerable time in some parts of Scotland. In 1610 an Edinburgh printer named Andrew Hart issued an edition of the Geneva Bible, with Lawrence Tomson's revision of the New Testament, which continued to be used for fifty years. As late as 1674 it was reported that at Kintore, in Aberdeenshire, there was a Bible “for public reading in the church, but of the old translation, therefore it is recommended to cause provide one of the new translation.” The “old translation” must have been the Geneva Bible, and the “new translation”, of course, the A.V. And there is evidence that in the parish church of Crail, in Fife, a Geneva Bible was used even later than that.

The Geneva Bible was the Bible of Shakespeare. In the address from “The Translators to the Reader” which was prefaced to the A.V. of 1611, it is from the Geneva Bible that the Scripture quotations are taken. Nor did the publication of the A.V. bring about the immediate discontinuance of the use of the Geneva Bible in England. The Soldier's Pocket Bible, issued in 1643 for the use of Oliver Cromwell's army, consisted of a selection of extracts from the Geneva Bible. The following year saw the printing of the last edition of the Geneva Bible.

The Geneva Bible is popularly referred to as the “Breeches Bible”, from the statement in Genesis 3:7 that Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together and made themselves “breeches”. This word had already been used here in the Wycliffite versions²² and in the translation of the Pentateuch contained in Voragine's Golden Legend, printed by Caxton in 1483.

THE BISHOPS' BIBLE

The instant success of the Geneva Bible made it impossible to go on using the Great Bible for reading in church; its deficiencies became all too obvious in the light of the new version. The Geneva Bible might commend itself admirably for church use in Scotland, where the Reformation was profoundly influenced by Geneva, but it was unacceptable for this purpose in England, if only because the leaders in church and state, not to mention the queen herself, did not appreciate the outspoken Calvinism of its annotations.

What was to be done then? We remember how, in the reign of Henry VIII, a beginning was made with a scheme to prepare an English Bible under the direct supervision of the bishops of the Church of England. At that time the scheme came to nothing; as Cranmer put it, when he urged Thomas Cromwell to procure the royal licence for Matthew's Bible, the bishops would probably have their edition ready a day after doomsday. The scheme was now revived. In 1561 Archbishop Matthew Parker submitted to the bishops of his province a proposal for revising the Great Bible. Sections of the work were assigned to a number of bishops who were suitably qualified for it, and a few scholars who were not bishops²³ were also invited to participate, while Parker himself acted as editor-in-chief and prepared the revision for the press. He was himself a scholar with the necessary training and aptitude for work of this kind. In seven years the work was completed, and copies of the “Bishops' Bible”, as this revision is called, were sent to the queen and to her chief minister, Sir William Cecil, on September 22, 1568. A list of the revisers and the sections which they had revised was enclosed; Parker had shown them this list in advance, “to make them more diligent, as answerable for their doings”. Elizabeth and Cecil were both scholars in their own right, and would be capable of assessing the workmanship of the individual revisers. Indeed, Parker had invited Cecil to take some small part in the work, but that statesman declined the honour.

The directions given to the revisers were short and simple. They were to use the Great Bible as their basis, and depart from it only where it did not accurately represent the original. To check the accuracy of translations from the Hebrew they were to compare the Latin versions of the Old Testament made direct from the Hebrew by Pagninus (1528) and Sebastian Münster (1539). (The Hebrew scholarship of the bishops and their colleagues could not compare with that of the Geneva translators.) They were to add no bitter or controversial annotations to the text; where a passage might be interpreted in the interests of one school or another, they were not to express any preference one way or the other (a timely and admirable direction). Passages containing genealogies “or other such places not edifying” were to be specially marked so that they could be left out in public reading. Expressions which, if read aloud, might be offensive to public taste were to be modified.

In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury ordered that “every archbishop and bishop should have at his house a copy of the holy Bible of the largest volume as lately printed at London … and that it should be placed in the hall or the large dining room, that it might be useful to their servants or to strangers”, that a copy should also be procured by every cathedral and, as far as possible, by every church. To this extent it superseded the Great Bible as the authorized version of the Church of England, but it was never formally recognized by the queen, or given any preferential treatment by her. (Perhaps her scholarship was sufficiently objective to convince her that the Geneva Bible was the better translation of the two, whatever she thought of its accessories.)

Had the Geneva Bible never been produced, the Bishops' Bible would have been the best English Bible to appear thus far. But as it was, the Bishops' Bible started off with the insuperable disadvantage that there was a better version already in the field. Some nineteen editions were published between 1568 and 1606, and eleven separate editions of the New Testament—figures which, impressive as they are in comparison with those available for earlier versions, fall far short of those for the successive editions of the Geneva Bible in the same period. The second edition (1569) contains several corrections and alterations of the wording in the first; and the third edition (1572), while for the most part ignoring the corrections and alterations made in the second, contains a thorough revision of the New Testament text of the first, and it was this revised text that was reprinted in subsequent editions. In the 1572 edition the Psalter from the Great Bible was printed in parallel columns with the Psalter as translated for the Bishops' Bible, and in a number of later editions of the Bishops' Bible the Great Bible Psalter alone was printed. The Great Bible Psalter was, of course, the Psalter used in the Prayer Book services, and it would be awkward to use two different versions of the Psalms in church, one of which was so much less familiar than the other.

THE KING JAMES VERSION

THE HAMPTON COURT CONFERENCE

When Elizabeth died, on March 24, 1603, the crown of England passed to James I, who had already worn the crown of Scotland for thirty-seven years as James VI. Some months after his coming to England, James summoned a conference of churchmen and theologians at Hampton Court “for the hearing, and for the determining, things pretended to be amiss in the Church”. Nothing much came of the Hampton Court Conference (which was held in January 1604), except—and a notable exception it was—the resolution

That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all Churches of England in time of divine service.

The proposal for a new translation came from Dr John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a leader of the Puritan side in the Church of England, and one of the greatest scholars of his day. It did not meet with unanimous approval; Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), complained that “if every man's humour were followed, there would be no end of translating.” But it did meet with the approval of the man who mattered most; James seized eagerly upon the proposal. “I profess,” he said, “I could never yet see a Bible well translated in English; but I think that, of all, that of Geneva is the worst. I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best-learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by Royal authority, to be read in the whole Church, and none other.”

It may be thought surprising that James, who was not deficient in scholarship, should stigmatize the Geneva version as the worst when in point of fact it was the best English translation of the Bible to have appeared thus far; but it is evident that it was not so much the translation as the accessories that he objected to. For when Bancroft urged that, if a new translation were to be undertaken, it should be without notes, James cordially agreed. He had seen, he said, among the notes annexed to the Geneva Bible some that were “very partial, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.” He instanced two which have been mentioned above: that on Exodus 1:19 which suggested that the Hebrew midwives were right to disobey the Egyptian king's orders, and that on 2 Chronicles 15:16, which stated that King Asa's mother should have been executed, and not merely deposed, for her idolatry—it is supposed that James's suspicious mind thought that this might react unfavourably upon the memory of his own mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

In any case, the stipulation that the new version should have no such annotations was a most praiseworthy one. No one would reasonably object to notes intended to make the sense plainer, and indeed notes of this kind were provided in the new version; but notes reflecting sectional points of view in theology or church polity could only limit the usefulness of a version intended for all the English people. It was the notes in the Geneva Bible, rather than the actual text, that made it unacceptable to so many of the leaders in church and state early in Elizabeth's reign, and led to the production of the rival Bishops' Bible. If the new version was to supersede both the Geneva and Bishops' versions; if it was to be used both as the Church's Bible and as the people's Bible; if it was to commend itself to all schools of thought, then it must not include features that would gratuitously offend any one group of readers.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE WORK

King James himself took a leading part in organizing the work of translation. Six panels of translators (forty-seven men in all) had the work divided up between them; the Old Testament was entrusted to three panels, the New Testament to two, and the Apocrypha to one. Two of the panels met at Oxford, two at Cambridge, and two at Westminster. When the panels had completed their task, the draft translation of the whole Bible was reviewed by a smaller group of twelve men, two from each panel, and then the work was sent to the printer. Miles Smith, Canon of Hereford (later to be Bishop of Gloucester), and Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, saw it through the press, and Miles Smith composed the informative preface, “The Translators to the Reader”.

The forty-seven men included most of the leading biblical scholars in England. They received very little in the way of financial consideration during their labours (neither King nor Parliament had much money to spare), but those who were not already incumbents of remunerative livings were not forgotten when these fell vacant.

The rules which guided them in their work were sanctioned, if they were not indeed drawn up, by James himself. The Bishops' Bible was to serve as the basis for the new translation. The names of Bible characters were to correspond as closely as possible to the forms in common use. The Geneva and Bishops' Bibles, in the Old Testament at any rate, had endeavoured to make proper names correspond closely to the Hebrew forms; thus “Isaac” appears in Geneva as Izhák and in the Bishops' Bible as Isahac. The new version reverted to common usage in this matter; but it did not attempt to maintain uniformity as between the Old Testament and the New. Thus the name which appears as Elijah in the Old Testament appears as Elias in the New, and it is particularly unhelpful to have Joshua twice referred to as “Jesus” in the New Testament (Acts 7:45; Hebrews 4:8), where some of the earlier English versions had properly put “Joshua”.

It was further laid down that the old ecclesiastical words were to be kept (“church” and not “congregation”, for example). Marginal notes were to be used only to explain Hebrew and Greek words, and to draw attention to parallel passages. Words necessary to complete the sense were to be printed in distinctive type. The existing chapter and verse divisions were to be retained; new headings were to be supplied for the chapters. This last provision did, of course, leave room for controversial matter, but the chapter headings actually provided were not such as to cause deep cleavages of opinion among English churchmen of that day. In most books the chapter headings are strictly factual, but in the poetical and prophetic books of the Old Testament they contain a good deal of theological exegesis. Thus, Psalm 93 is entitled “The majesty, power and holiness of Christ's kingdom”; all the mutual professions of love in the Song of Songs are declared to be exchanges between the Church and Christ; Isaiah 51 is said to contain “an exhortation after the pattern of Abraham to trust in Christ, by reason of his comfortable promises, of his righteous salvation, and man's mortality.” But these were not issues that divided Bible readers in the seventeenth century.

THE PUBLICATION OF THE WORK

When at last the new version was published, it bore the title:

The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues, with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties speciall commandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie. Anno Dom. 1611.

The New Testament bore the separate title:

The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Newly translated out of the Originall Greeke; and with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesties speciall Commandement. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie. Anno Dom. 1611. cum Privilegio.

The 1611 version is commonly called the Authorized Version. If it be asked by what body its authorization was effected, the answer is best given in the words of Lord Chancellor Selborne, in the correspondence columns of The Times for June 3, 1881: “nothing is more probable than that this may have been done by Order in Council. If so, the authentic record of that order may be lost, because all the Council books and registers from the year 1600 to 1613 inclusive were destroyed by a fire at Whitehall on the 12th of January, 1618 (O.S.).” The words “Appointed to be read in Churches” indicated the intention that henceforth the new version should supersede the Bishops' Bible in the services of the Church, as the Bishops' Bible had previously superseded the Great Bible.

In America the 1611 version is more commonly referred to as the “King James Version” (KJV)—a designation which is historically justified by the active part taken by King James in organizing the translation and sealing the finished product with his approval; although it is said that some people who speak of the “King James Version” imagine that he was the translator, if not indeed the original author.

DEDICATION TO THE KING

The translators' dedication of their work “to the most high and mighty prince James” is well known, since it continues to be printed in the forefront of most British editions of the A.V. King James must have found the flattering terminology used towards him by his English churchmen a pleasant change from the homely language of some of his Scottish churchmen, like Andrew Melville, who plucked him by the sleeve, called him “God's silly vassal”, and reminded him that although he was king in the kingdom of Scotland he was only an ordinary member in the kingdom of Christ! The translators express their pleasure at James's active interest in the translation of Holy Writ, and their hope that what they have done in this line may win his approval. No doubt, they say, they will be attacked by extremists from right and left—“traduced by Popish Persons at home or abroad, who therefore will malign us, because we are poor instruments to make God's holy Truth to be yet more and more known unto the people, whom they desire still to keep in ignorance and darkness; or … maligned by selfconceited Brethren, who run their own ways, and give liking unto nothing, but what is framed by themselves, and hammered on their anvil.” But they need not be over-concerned about such attacks, seeing they are supported by their own good conscience regarding their work and by the king's grace and favour.

THE TRANSLATORS TO THE READER

Much more interesting is the lengthy preface, “The Translators to the Reader”, which unfortunately is printed nowadays only in very few editions of the A.V. This preface begins, in a leisurely and learned fashion, by justifying the principle of Bible translation; it then goes on to declare the necessity for this new translation. No discredit, the translators insist, is intended to the memory of their predecessors, who gave the English people the Bible in their own tongue under the Tudor monarchs. Those predecessors laid a good foundation, apart from which it would not have been possible to erect such a superstructure as is now presented to the reader. To those who question the necessity of this latest work, they answer that they have obeyed the king's commandment. “And what can the King command to be done, that will bring him more true honour than this?” People ought to thank God for a ruler who takes such great interest in his people's spiritual welfare rather than cavil and criticize. To those who point out defects in their work, they answer that perfection is never attainable by man, but the word of God may be recognized in the very meanest translation of the Bible, just as the king's speech addressed to Parliament remains the king's speech when translated into other languages than that in which it was spoken, even if it be not translated word for word, and even if some of the renderings are capable of improvement. To those who complain that they have introduced so many changes in relation to the older English version, they answer by expressing surprise that revision and correction should be imputed as faults. The whole history of Bible translation in any language, they say, is a history of repeated revision and correction.

After dealing at some length with their critics, they state the principles on which they have worked.

Truly, good Christian Reader, we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one; … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavour, that our mark. To that purpose there were many chosen, that were greater in other men's eyes than in their own, and that sought the truth rather than their own praise.²⁴ … And in what sort did these assemble? In the trust of their own knowledge, or of their sharpness of wit, or deepness of judgment, as it were in an arm of flesh? At no hand. They trusted in him that hath the key of David, opening, and no man shutting; they prayed to the Lord, the Father of our Lord, to the effect that St. Augustine did: “O let thy Scriptures be my pure delight; let me not be deceived in them, neither let me deceive by them.” In this confidence, and with this devotion, did they assemble together; not too many, lest one should trouble another; and yet many, lest many things haply might escape them. If you ask what they had before them, truly it was the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New. … These tongues … we set before us to translate, being the tongues wherein God was pleased to speak to his Church by his Prophets and Apostles. Neither did we run over the work with that posting haste that the Septuagint did, if that be true which is reported of them. … The work hath not been huddled up in seventy two days, but hath cost the workmen, as light as it seemeth, the pains of twice seven times seventy two days, and more. Matters of such weight and consequence are to be speeded with maturity: for in a business of moment a man feareth not the blame of convenient slackness. Neither did we think much to consult the translators or commentators, Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greek, or Latin; no, nor the Spanish, French, Italian, or Dutch; neither did we disdain to revise that which we had done, and to bring back to the anvil that which we had hammered: but having and using as great helps as were needful, and fearing no reproach for slowness, nor coveting praise for expedition, we have at length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the work to that pass that you see.

They mention that some readers have misgivings about the alternative renderings suggested in the margin, on the ground that they may appear to shake the authority of Scripture in deciding points of controversy. This obscurantist objection has been urged against other Bible versions, of much more recent date; some people would prefer a false appearance of certainty to an honest admission of doubt. The translators do not wish to exaggerate their competence in the biblical languages.

There be many words in the Scriptures, which be never found there but once (having neither brother nor neighbour, as the Hebrews speak), so that we cannot be holpen by conference of places. Again, there be many rare names of certain birds, beasts, and precious stones, etc., concerning which the Hebrews themselves are so divided among themselves for judgment, that they may seem to have defined this or that, rather because they would say something, than because they were sure of that which they said.

This is an important point; our understanding of the Hebrew vocabulary, especially in regard to such terms as are indicated by the A.V. translators, has been gradually increasing over the generations, and has received much welcome illumination in fairly recent times. The R.V. reflects fuller knowledge in this field than the A.V.; the R.S.V. represents an advance on the R.V.; and the New English Bible will be found to have profited greatly by recent advances in Semitic philology, but even the New English Bible makes no pretence of having attained finality. Where, then, there is doubt about the meaning of a word or phrase, is it not better to warn the reader that this is so? And what is true of uncertainties in translation applies with equal force to variant readings in the manuscripts and other authorities for the text. This too the A.V. translators point out when they criticize Pope Sixtus V for his ruling that no variant readings should be put in the margin of his edition of the Latin Vulgate. “They that are wise had rather have their judgments at liberty in differences of readings, than to be captivated to one, when it might be the other.”

Another feature of their work to which the translators draw the reader's attention is their deliberate employment of a variety of English synonyms to represent the same terms in the original text.

Another thing we think good to admonish thee of, gentle Reader, that we have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men somewhere have been as exact as they could that way. Truly, that we might not vary from the sense of that which we had translated before, if the word signified the same thing in both places (for there be some words that be not of the same sense every where), we were especially careful, and made a conscience according to our duty. But that we should express the same notion in the same particular word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greek word once by purpose, never to call it intent; if one where journeying, never travelling; if one where think, never suppose; if one where pain, never ache; if one where joy, never gladness, etc., thus to mince the matter, we thought to savour more of curiosity than wisdom, and that rather it would breed scorn in the atheist, than bring profit to the godly reader. For is the kingdom of God become words or syllables? Why should we be in bondage to them, if we may be free? use one precisely, when we may use another no less fit as commodiously? … We might also be charged (by scoffers) with some unequal dealing towards a great number of good English words. For as it is written of a certain great Philosopher, that he should say, that those logs were happy that were made images to be worshipped; for their fellows, as good as they, lay for blocks behind the fire: so if we should say, as it were, unto certain words, Stand up higher, have a place in the Bible always; and to others of like quality, Get you hence, be banished for ever; we might be taxed peradventure with St. James's words, namely, “To be partial in ourselves, and judges of evil thoughts.” Add hereunto, that niceness in words was always counted the next step to trifling; and so was to be curious about names too: also that we cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God himself; therefore he using divers words in his holy writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature: we, if we will not be superstitious, may use the same liberty in our English versions out of Hebrew and Greek, for that copy or store that he hath given us.

An example of their procedure in this matter is provided in the opening verses of the fifth chapter of Romans. Where the A.V. says, “we … rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (verse 2), “we glory in tribulations” (verse 3), and “we also joy in God” (verse 11), the italicized verbs represent one and the same Greek verb. The R.V. renders all three occurrences by “rejoice”. If the aim of translation should be the production of the same effect in the reader of the translation as the original wording produced in the reader of the original text, then there is much to be said in a passage like this for translating the same original word by the same word in English; for a good part of the effect intended by the original writer was produced by his deliberate repetition of one and the same word. Certainly the translator must not be peremptorily debarred from the skilful and appropriate choice of the right synonym in the right context, but there are times when the recurrence of the same word is exactly what is required. The English language, for example, has a considerable range of words more or less synonymous with “horse”; but it is the repetition of “horse” that makes Richard III's cry so effective: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Let the reader replace the second and third occurrences of “horse” by two other words with much the same meaning, and realize how inept the result is. It is probably right to say that the A.V. has gone too far in its love of variation, whereas the R.V. runs to the opposite extreme.

The preface then goes on:

Lastly, we have on the one side avoided the scrupulosity of the Puritans, who leave the old Ecclesiastical words, and betake them to other, as when they put washing for baptism, and congregation instead of Church; as also on the other side we have shunned the obscurity of the Papists, in their azymes, tunike, rational, holocausts, prepuce, pasche, and a number of such like, whereof their late translation is full, and that of purpose to darken the sense, that since they must needs translate the Bible, yet by the language thereof it may be kept from being understood. But we desire that the Scripture may speak like itself, as in the language of Canaan, that it may be understood even of the very vulgar.

The reference to the Puritan preference for “non-ecclesiastical” terms reminds us of More's criticism of Tyndale. The “late translation” of the “Papists” is the Rheims New Testament of 1582, which we shall look at in our next chapter. Some of its vocabulary was highly latinate, and it is on this that the preface makes such severe comment. But of the six words which it quotes as samples, three (“tunics”, “rational” and “holocausts”) have passed into common currency. The Old Testament companion to the Rheims New Testament—the Douai Old Testament—was not published until 1609 and 1610, too late for the A.V. translators to make its acquaintance effectively.

The translators evidently worked with a proper sense of responsibility; it was no light thing in their eyes to handle the sacred scriptures as translators must. But they conclude their preface by pleading for an equal sense of responsibility in their readers.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; but a blessed thing it is, and will bring us to everlasting blessedness in the end, when God speaketh unto us, to hearken; when he setteth his word before us, to read it; when he stretcheth out his hand and calleth, to answer, Here am I, here we are to do thy will, O God. The Lord work a care and conscience in us to know him and serve him that we may be acknowledged of him at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with the Holy Ghost be all praise and thanksgiving. Amen.

The quality of their work needs no commendation from anyone at this time of day; three hundred and fifty years have gone by since they completed their task, and to-day their version is still used in preference to any other in many areas of English-speaking Protestantism. Quite apart from its formal authorization, its intrinsic superiority over the versions that went before it soon made itself felt, and in a very short time it established itself as the version for church and home, for public and private use, superseding the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible alike.

HUGH BROUGHTON ON THE A.V.

It would have been surprising, however, if no censorious voice had been raised against it. The new version did not lack critics, but none was more forthright in his root-and-branch condemnation of it than Dr Hugh Broughton, a distinguished scholar described eloquently by his fellow-scholar John Lightfoot as “the Great Albionean Divine, renowned in many Nations for Rare Skill in Salems and Athens Tongues and Familiar Acquaintance with all Rabbinical Learning”. For all his erudition, Broughton was not included among the revisers; he was not cut out for collaboration with others, and would have proved an impossible colleague. Probably he resented the fact that he was not invited to serve, and when the new version appeared, he sent a critique of it to one of the king's attendants:

The late Bible … was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is so ill done. Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches. … The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt.

Broughton had for thirty years been preparing a revision of his own, based on the Geneva Bible, which to his mind was the best existing English version. For the Bishops' Bible, on the other hand, he could find nothing good to say. “The cockles of the sea shores,” he declared, “and the leaves of the forest, and the grains of the poppy, may as well be numbered as the gross errors of this Bible, disgracing the ground of our own hope”; and he thought that it “might well give place to the Alkoran, pestred with lies”. He did not live long enough to publish his revision of Geneva, for he died in 1612, at the age of sixty-three, confident to the last in the supremacy of his own learning: “I will suffer no scholar in the world to cross me in Hebrew and Greek, when I am sure I have the truth.”

SUCCESSIVE EDITIONS

The Authorized Version took no harm from his fiery outburst against it. Three editions appeared in quick succession in the year of publication. These were folio editions, measuring 16 by 10[frac12] inches. The earliest is known as “the great he edition” and the other two as “the great she editions”, because the first renders the closing words of Ruth 3:15 “and he went into the city”, whereas the others have “and she went into the city” (the Hebrew manuscripts themselves are divided between “he” and “she”). Quarto and octavo editions were published in 1612.

The heavy punctuation of the A.V. was designed to guide public readers of the Bible in church to enunciate properly and to place the emphasis in the right places. Paragraph marks (¶) indicated the beginning of each paragraph up to Acts 20:36, but none appear after that point. Why this should be is not at all certain. Some correspondence on the subject was published in John o' London's Weekly on September 28 and October 19, 1951. In the former issue John Stirling, editor of The Bible for Today, suggested that after Acts 20:36 “perhaps the printer ran out of these signs! It certainly looks, judging from the way he missed occasional references in the immediately preceding chapters, as though he were running short of them; and as there were not many more pages to set up it was, perhaps, hardly worth while making any more. Who knows?” To this suggestion the latter issue carried a reply from T. J. Tudge: “That suggestion implies that the type for the whole book was set up before printing, as is the practice to-day, but stocks of the hand-cast type then used were so small that usually only four pages were set up and printed, the type being then distributed in order to set up the next four, and so on throughout; therefore the long-suffering printer would have just as many para. marks for the end as for the start of the Bible.” Perhaps no more appeared in the master copy.

There are quite a number of misprints and variations in wording and spelling in the early editions. One original misprint has been perpetuated in editions of the A.V. to the present time: “strain at a gnat” instead of “strain out a gnat” in Matt. 23:24. The first edition had, in Mark 10:18, “There is no man good, but one, that is God”; later editions have changed “no man” to the more appropriate “none”. But of all the misprints that the A.V. has suffered from, none has been so scandalous as the omission of the word “not” from the Seventh Commandment in an edition of 1631, for which the King's printers were fined £300 by Archbishop Laud. The offending edition was commonly known as the “Wicked Bible”. An Oxford edition of 1717 was known as the “Vinegar Bible” because the chapter-heading to Luke 20 had “Vinegar” for “Vineyard” in the title “The Parable of the Vineyard”. The “Murderers' Bible” (Oxford, 1795) was so called because Mark 7:27 was made to read: “Let the children first be killed” (“killed” instead of “filled”). Other outstanding misprints were “he slew two lions like men” (2 Sam. 23:20, for “… lionlike men”) and “the dogs liked (for ‘licked up’) his blood” (1 Kings 22:38). The moral of all this was pointed most effectually by the careless typesetter who made Psalm 119:161 read: “Printers have persecuted me without a cause”!

In the course of time the spelling of the earliest editions of the A.V. was modified and modernized; sometimes it still looks archaic (e.g. “marishes” in Ezek. 47:11, “plaister” in Dan. 5:5; “your's” in Luke 6:20, “musick” in Luke 15:25), but a comparison with early editions will show how it has been kept up-to-date. The chapter summaries have been reduced in the course of successive editions; the marginal references have been expanded. All this has been brought about piecemeal by private enterprise. In 1701 dates were introduced into the margin, at the instance of Bishop Lloyd; these were based in the main on the calculations of Archbishop Ussher.

PROSE RHYTHMS

The A.V. was admirably suited for public reading. A study of its prose rhythms suggests that the men responsible for it (not only King James's revisers but their predecessors as far back as Tyndale) had an instinctive feeling for good style.²⁵ If preachers, orators and writers would spend a little time noting the rhythms of the early English Bible, they would grow discontented with the sentences that please them now. Consider, for instance, the effect of the long row of anapaests (short short long) in Isa. 53:1: “Who / hath believed / our report, / and to whom / is the arm / of the Lord / revealed?” The last word, “revealed”, was possibly pronounced as an amphibrach (short long short). The initial “Who” serves as an anacrusis or “striking-up” syllable. Or consider the change from iambus (short long) to anapaest in Psalm 136:8: “the sun / to rule / by day; / for his me / rcy endu / reth for e / ver.” Another example of the use of anapaests comes in Deut. 32:2: “My doc / trine shall drop / as the rain, / my speech / shall distil / as the dew.” Observe, too, the use of cretic feet (long short long) in the translation of James 1:19, “Swift to hear, / slow to speak, / slow to wrath,” and the combination of dactyls (long short short) and spondees (long long) which occasionally produces something like the hexameter verse of Greek and Latin poetry: “Bind their / kings with / chains, and their / nobles with / fetters of / iron” (Psalm 149:8); “How art thou / fallen from / heaven, O / Lucifer, / son of the / morning!” (Isa. 14:12); “Husbands, / love your / wives, and / be not / bitter a / gainst them” (Col. 3:19).

Prose rhythms do not obtrude themselves on the notice of readers or hearers, but they make a powerful impression none the less. Harsh combinations of sounds or accents, on the other hand, produce a sense of distaste. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves” is not such an infallible rule as the duchess in Alice imagined; it was to a considerable extent the failure of the men who produced the R.V. in the 1880's to consider the sounds as well as the sense that prevented their work from attaining anything like the popularity enjoyed by the A.V.

THE LONG PARLIAMENT

A few attempts were made later in the seventeenth century to revise the A.V. or produce a fresh translation, but nothing came of them. The Long Parliament in the reign of Charles I set up a commission to consider what might be done in the matter, but no further action was taken.

THE A.V. OF THE APOCRYPHA

Like its predecessors, the A.V. included a translation of the Apocrypha. Four years later Archbishop Abbot forbade anyone to issue the Bible without the Apocrypha, on pain of one year's imprisonment. The Church of England, in accordance with Article VI, reads the books of the Apocrypha “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” The Puritan party, however, and those who took their guidance from Geneva rather than from Canterbury, disapproved of the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bible at all. Some copies of the Geneva Bible published at Geneva in 1599 omitted the Apocrypha, but this omission was the binder's work; there is a gap in the page-numbering between the Testaments.²⁶ An Amsterdam edition of the Geneva Bible,²⁷ published in 1640, omitted the Apocrypha as a matter of policy, and inserted a defence of this policy between the Testaments. In 1644 the Long Parliament, in which Puritan views were very influential, decreed that only the canonical books of the Old Testament should be read in church, and three years later the Westminster Confession of Faith declared that “the books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are not part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”

This policy prevailed in the Church of Scotland, but was reversed in the Church of England after the Restoration. The Nonconformists, however, continued for the most part to disregard the Apocrypha except for the historical value of the books. It is not without significance that the first English Bible printed in America (1782-3) omitted the Apocrypha.²⁸ The fashion of printing the A.V. without the Apocrypha was reinforced by the example of the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804), which in 1826 adopted the policy of omitting the Apocrypha from its editions. It is said that, when this Society offered to provide the copy of the Bible to be presented to King Edward VII at his coronation in 1902, the offer was declined by Archbishop Frederick Temple on the ground that a “mutilated Bible” was unacceptable.

NECESSITY OF REVISION

For all its merits, the A.V. could not be expected to remain unchallenged for ever. Apart from gradual changes in English usage, which have made its language seem increasingly remote and archaic to many people to-day who have not the literary equipment to appreciate it, the advances which have taken place during the past three and a half centuries in knowledge of the original languages and text of the Bible have made its revision imperative. Yet it is well recognized that, throughout the English-speaking world, there are hundreds of thousands of readers by whom this version is accepted as “The Word of God” in a sense in which no other version would be so accepted. Such an attitude towards what is but one among many available translations may be open to criticism, but its persistence is a tribute to the sound workmanship of the men to whom we owe the version of 1611.

note. John Bois (or Boys), Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, served as one of the translators from 1604 to 1608 and later as a member of the committee which reviewed the whole work and delivered the one approved master copy to the printers. He was the only member of this committee to take notes, and he provided in his will for their safe keeping after his death (1643). They are now in the Bodleian Library. An edition of them by Dr. Ward Allen, Associate Professor of English at Auburn University, Alabama, accompanied by a facsimile of the original, has recently (September 1969) been published by Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, Tennessee.

THE ENGLISH BIBLE FOR ROMAN CATHOLICS

There were, until 1965, two versions of the Bible in English approved by ecclesiastical authority for Roman Catholic readers in Britain. One of these was what we commonly refer to as the “Douai Bible” (very often the older spelling “Douay” is used); the other was the version made in our own day by the late Mgr Ronald A. Knox. For both of these the Latin Vulgate has served as the basis, rather than the Hebrew and Greek texts, although Mgr Knox's version in particular has kept the Hebrew and Greek texts in view throughout. The reason for using the Latin Vulgate as the basis for these authorized versions was that the Council of Trent in 1546 laid it down that this “ancient and vulgate version, which is approved by the long use of so many centuries in the Church herself, be held as authentic in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expository discourses, and that no one may make bold or presume to reject it on any pretext.” In respect of their Latin basis, then, the Douai and Knox versions may be said to follow in the Wycliffite tradition of the English Bible, whereas the Protestant versions for the most part have followed in the tradition established by Tyndale.

THE DOUAI BIBLE

When we call the older Roman Catholic version the Douai Bible, we are simplifying the situation considerably. What is usually called the Douai Bible is really a very thorough revision carried through in 1749 by Bishop Richard Challoner of a translation made a century and a half previously by one Gregory Martin, a member of the English College at Douai, in northern France.

If one group of exiles embarked on the work of Bible translation into English in Mary's reign, another group of exiles undertook a similar task in Elizabeth's reign.

William Allen, sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, refused to acquiesce in the Elizabethan religious settlement and settled in Flanders, where in 1568 he founded the English College at Douai, for the maintenance of the Roman Catholic cause. The college was moved to Rheims in 1578, where it was governed by another Oxford scholar, Richard Bristow, sometime Fellow of Exeter College. Allen later left Flanders for Rome, where he founded another English College, and in due course became a Cardinal. In 1593 the earlier college moved back from Rheims to Douai.

During the years that the college had its headquarters in Rheims one of its most distinguished professors, Gregory Martin (formerly Scholar of St John's College, Oxford), translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English for the benefit of English-speaking adherents of the old religion. He translated the Old Testament first and then the New; his New Testament translation, however, was published first, in 1582, while the College was still at Rheims (whence it is properly known as the Rheims New Testament), but his Old Testament translation was not published until 1609-10, after the return of the College to Douai (whence it is properly called the Douai Old Testament). He is said to have carried through his work of translation systematically, at the rate of two chapters a day, and as each section was completed it was revised by his colleagues Allen and Bristow.

PRINCIPLES OF TRANSLATION

The preface to the Rheims New Testament asserts that this work has been rendered necessary by the circulation of many “false translations” by Protestants, who have corrupted the truth of Holy Writ, “adding, detracting, altering, transposing, pointing, and all other guileful means: specially where it serveth for the advantage of their private opinions.” The use of the Latin version rather than the Greek original as the base of the new translation is defended and so is the retention of Latin or latinate terms in the English text. The translator and his colleagues explain their practice thus:

In this our translation, because we wish it to be most sincere, as becometh a Catholic translation, and have endeavoured so to make it: we are very precise and religious in following our copy, the old vulgar approved Latin: not only in sense, which we hope we always do, but sometimes in the very words also and phrases, which may seem to the vulgar reader and to common English ears not yet acquainted therewith, rudeness or ignorance. … Moreover we presume not in hard places to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them word for word, and point for point, for fear of missing, or restraining the sense of the Holy Ghost to our fantasy, as Eph. vi. 12, “Against the spirituals of wickedness in the celestials” … We add the Latin word sometimes in the margin, when either we cannot fully express it, or when the reader might think it cannot be as we translate.

And they conclude:

Thus we have endeavoured by all means, to satisfy the indifferent reader, and to help his understanding every way, both in the text, and by annotations: and withal to deal most sincerely before God and man, in translating and expounding the most sacred text of the holy Testament.

The statement that they do not presume “in hard places to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them word for word”, may be illustrated by a few simple examples. In Heb. 13:4 the A.V. reads “Marriage is honourable in all”, whereas the R.V. reads “Let marriage be had in honour among all”. The verb “to be” must be supplied, as its presence is not required either in the Greek original or in the Latin Vulgate. But the supplying even of such a simple verb as this calls for a measure of interpretation. Should the verb be supplied in the indicative or in the imperative mood? Is the writer stating a fact or laying down the law? The A.V. prefers the former alternative, the R.V. the latter. Gregory Martin refuses to be impaled on either horn of this dilemma: “Mariage honorable in all”, he says, translating the Latin literally, and if it be objected that his rendering is not English, so much the worse for the English!

Again, in the story of the changing of the water into wine, A.V. and R.V. make our Lord say to His Mother, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” whereas R.S.V. renders His words: “O woman, what have you to do with me?” (John 2:4). These are two possible alternative renderings of the original idiomatic wording, found in Greek and Latin alike, of which a literal translation would be “What to me and to thee, woman?” This, incidentally, is the precise wording of the Wycliffite version. Gregory Martin compromises here to the extent of supplying the verb “to be”; his version reads: “What is to me and thee woman?”—which, whatever it is, is not English. In the eighteenth century, when Bishop Challoner revised the Douai-Rheims version, he saw that Martin's rendering would not stand here, so he changed it to “Woman, what is it to me and to thee?”—which is good English, but unfortunately is just not what our Lord said. What He did say is admirably expressed in R. A. Knox's version: “Nay, woman, why dost thou trouble me with that?”

THE OLD TESTAMENT

In the Old Testament the opening words of Isaiah's vineyard song are strangely unintelligible: “A vineyard was made to my beloved in horn, the son of oil” (Isa. 5:1)—but that is because Jerome translated a Hebrew idiom over-literally into Latin, and his Latin was followed over-faithfully by Gregory Martin. “Horn” is a metaphorical term for “hill”, and “son of oil” means “fertile” or “abundant”; hence the A.V. gives the true sense when it says: “My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill.”

In all the Douai Old Testament it is the Psalter that contains the highest proportion of unintelligible expressions, but that is because the Latin edition of the Psalter which Martin translated was not Jerome's version from the Hebrew, but one of the versions which he made from the Greek Septuagint—the Gallican Psalter, which was the version chiefly used in the services of the Church. The Douai Psalter is thus a translation of a translation of a translation. In Psalm 68:12 (67:13 in the Vulgate and Douai numbering) the Hebrew text is reasonably well represented by the A.V., “Kings of armies did flee apace: and she that tarried at home divided the spoil”. But the Douai rendering is not only widely divergent from this, but is meaningless as it stands: “The king of hoastes the beloved of the beloved; and to the beauty of the house, to divide the spoils”. The error, however, is primarily due to the Septuagint translators; that is how they misrendered the Hebrew, and their misrendering was reproduced in the Gallican Psalter and thence in the Douai Old Testament. Challoner's revision of the Douai rendering could make but little improvement here: “The king of powers is of the beloved, of the beloved; and the beauty of the house shall divide spoils”—for he was still tied to the Gallican Psalter. When Mgr Knox, in his turn, had to see what he could make of the Gallican Psalter here, he produced, as might be expected, something that was good English, but something which inevitably bore little relation to the Psalmist's meaning and not very much to the construction of the Gallican Psalter. He tied the verse in question closely to the preceding one, and rendered the two as follows: “Here are bringers of good news, with a message the Lord has given them, from the army he leads; a king, leading the armies of a beloved people; a people how well beloved! He bids the favourites of his court divide the spoil between them.” But in addition to his version of the Gallican Psalter, Knox appended to the first edition of his Old Testament translation a version of a new Latin Psalter based directly on the Hebrew,²⁹ and in this version the verse is rendered: “Routed the kings, routed their armies; they have left their spoils for housewives to carry away”—which gives much the same sense as the A.V.

LATINISMS IN THE DOUAI BIBLE

Another feature of the Douai-Rheims version to which the editors draw attention is its preference for the traditional ecclesiastical terms, derived from Latin, over alternative renderings which, even if they were homely English expressions, had not the same religious associations in the sixteenth century as some of them have subsequently acquired. Where no theological associations were involved, Martin's English could be as “racy of the soil” as Tyndale's, and occasionally more so; thus in the story of Peter's escape from prison, when he arrives at the house of Mary, the Rheims version goes on: “And when he knocked at the doore of the gate, there came forth a wenche to see, named Rhodè” (here Tyndale and the Protestant versions generally, following Wycliffe, call Rhoda a “damozel” or “damsel”). But in general the vocabulary of the Douai-Rheims version is highly latinate (although not so latinate as Stephen Gardiner's draft of 1542). Here, for example, is the Lord's Prayer according to Matt. 6:9-13:

Ovr Father which art in heauen, sanctified be thy name. Let thy Kingdom come. Thy wil be done, as in heauen, in earth also. Giue vs to day our supersubstantial bread. And forgiue vs our dettes, as we also forgiue our detters. And leade vs not into tentation. But deliuer vs from euil. Amen.

Here we note that Rheims uses “sanctified” where English-speaking Protestants use the native English “hallowed”; but it is a matter of no importance which of these synonyms is used. But what is the “supersubstantial” bread for which God is asked? The word goes back to Jerome, who used (and possibly coined) the Latin supersubstantialis to represent the Greek epiousios, because of what appears to have been a mistaken idea of the etymology of the Greek word. In the light of papyrus evidence, Jesus should be understood as teaching His disciples to pray for (and to be content with) a day's ration of bread at a time; but “supersubstantial” bread can only be supernatural bread, that is to say Christ Himself, as the bread of life. It is indeed a good thing to pray to be satisfied with the living bread, but this was probably not the intention of this petition in the Lord's Prayer.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is told thus in the Rheims version:

A certaine man went downe from Hierusalem into Iericho, and fel among theeues, who also spoiled him, and giuing him woundes went away leauing him halfe-dead. And it chaunced that a certaine Priest went downe the same way: and seeing him, passed by. In like maner also a Leuite, when he was neere the place, and saw him, passed by. But a certaine Samaritane going his iourney, came neere him: and seeing him, was moued with mercie. And going vnto him, bound his woundes, powring in oile and wine: and setting him vpon his owne beaste, brought him into an inne, and tooke care of him. And the next day he tooke forth two pence, and gaue to the host, and said, Haue care of him: and whatsoeuer thou shalt supererogate, I at my returne will repay thee. Which of these three in thy opinion was neighbour to him that fel among theeues? But he said, He that did mercie vpon him. And Iesvs said to him, Go, and doe thou in like maner.

Here the story is told straightforwardly in plain English, until we come to the Samaritan's request to the innkeeper: “whatsoever thou shalt supererogate”. This is simply a question of taking Jerome's Latin verb over into English. To many English readers it would mean nothing; to some it would convey a meaning different from that originally intended, for they would think of it in the light of the doctrine of supererogation,³⁰ whereas the proper sense is conveyed exactly by the A.V., “whatsoever thou spendest more.”

It is when we come to the Epistles, however, that the latinate vocabulary of Rheims becomes most impressive. One frequently quoted passage should not be regarded as typical, as its proportion of Latinisms is well above average; but it is worth reproducing (Eph. 3:8-13):

To me the least of al the sainctes is giuen this grace, among the Gentils to euangelize the vnsearcheable riches of Christ, and to illuminate al men what is the dispensation of the sacrament hidden from worldes in God, who created al things, that the manifold wisedom of God may be notified to the Princes and Potestats in the celestials by the Church, according to the prefinition of worldes, which he made in Christ Iesvs our Lord. In whom we haue affiance and accesse in confidence, by the faith of him. For the which cause I desire that you faint not in my tribulations for you, which is your glorie.

The opening paragraph of Hebrews runs as follows in Rheims:

Diversely and many waies in times past God speaking to the fathers in the prophets: last of al in these daies hath spoken to vs in his Sonne, whom he hath appointed heire of al, by whom he made also the worldes. Who being the brightnesse of his glorie and the figure of his substance, and carying all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sinnes, sitteth on the right hand of the Maiestie in the high places: being made so much better then Angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name aboue them.

This is no more latinate than the A.V. Rheims says “figure of his substance” where Tyndale had “very ymage of his substance” (A.V., “express image of his person”) because the phrase in the Vulgate is figura substantiae eius. The most important point of difference in the Rheims version of this paragraph is its use of the present participle “making purgation for sins”, as though this were something which the Son of God is still doing during His heavenly session. Tyndale and the versions dependent on him make it clear that the “making purgation for sins” is something which precedes the Son's taking His seat at the Father's right hand. An important theological issue is involved here, but the divergence between the Rheims version and the Protestant versions is due to nothing more than the unfortunate fact that most Latin verbs do not have a perfect participle in the active voice. The Greek says plainly, “having made purification for sins he sat down”, but there is no participial form in Latin that means “having made”, so the Latin translators used the present participle instead, and have naturally been followed in this regard by most versions based on the Vulgate, from the earlier Wycliffite version (“he makith purgacioun of synnes”) to Knox (“making atonement for our sins”).

The more latinate passages in Douai-Rheims sound strangely in English ears, as the editors knew they would. We must remember, indeed, that the Douai-Rheims version represents the losing side in the English Reformation conflict, and that even among Roman Catholics it has never been the household work that the A.V. has been among Protestants. Mgr Knox argues³¹ that, if the rôles had been reversed, the Douai-Rheims language would have become what we know as “Bible English” and the A.V. idiom would have sounded barbarous and exotic. It is true that much of the A.V. idiom is as essentially Hebrew as much of the Douai-Rheims idiom is essentially Latin;³² and whereas many originally Hebraic turns of phrase found in the A.V. have become naturalized in English, others (for all their familiarity) have never made their way into ordinary speech. For example, the Hebrew idiom “and it came to pass that …”, so common in the A.V. and R.V., has never been accepted as normal English, and so it has been dropped from the R.S.V. and other recent English versions. In the A.V., however, if the idiom is often Hebraic, the vocabulary is not; whereas in Douai-Rheims the vocabulary as well as the idiom is strongly influenced by the Latin of the Vulgate. Would all these latinate terms have become part and parcel of our ordinary speech if Douai-Rheims, instead of the A.V., had become the Bible of the English-speaking peoples as a whole? Where the might-have-been's of history are concerned, it is easier to ask interesting questions than to return confident answers. The Rheims editors had sufficient consideration for their readers to provide a glossary at the end of their work which gave the meanings of fifty-eight unusual words used in the version. Quite a number of these have now become familiar English words (such as “acquisition”, “adulterate”, “advent”, “allegory”, “cooperate”, “prescience”, “resuscitate”, “victim”), some have never become generally current (such as “prefinition” in Eph. 3:11), while others are now employed in a different sense from that which they were given by the Rheims editors (such as “evacuate” in “you are evacuated from Christ” in Gal. 5:4).

The Rheims editors also adhered to their policy of retaining the old ecclesiastical words and phrases, even where lapse of time had given these a different sense from that which they originally had: thus John the Baptist and Jesus alike call upon their hearers to “doe penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2; 4:17). When Peter was imprisoned by Herod, “it was the daies of the Azymes” and Herod's intention was “after the Pasche to bring him forth to the people” (Acts 12:3 f.). Not only is the cup of the Holy Communion called the “chalice” (Matt. 26:27, etc.), but Jesus in Gethsemane prays that “this chalice” may pass from Him (Matt. 26:39, etc.). Paul and Barnabas ordain “Priests in euery Church” in southern Asia Minor (Acts 14:23); although “priests” is a reduced form of “presbyters” (the word used here in Greek and Latin), it had acquired a specialized sense (those who officiate at sacrifices) in the course of centuries, and so Tyndale and his successors rendered the term more accurately by “elders”. In other places, indeed, the Rheims version itself recognizes the true meaning of the word: thus, 1 Peter 5:1 reads, following the Vulgate: “The seniors therfore that are among you I beseche, my self a fellow senior with them” (A.V., “The elders … I exhort, who am also an elder”).

The Rheims New Testament was consulted by the men who gave us the A.V., and in a number of instances its Latinisms appear to have influenced the A.V. vocabulary. (The Douai Old Testament was not published in time for it to be of much use to the A.V. translators.) Bishop Westcott³³ has listed from one epistle alone (the Epistle to the Romans) an impressive number of words of Latin origin which, in his opinion, the A.V. took over from Rheims. But these words do not strike us as unusual words—perhaps for the simple fact that they occur in the A.V.!

Another point which Bishop Westcott draws attention to³⁴ is particularly noteworthy. The Hebrew and Greek languages possess the definite article; Latin does not. Where the definite article occurs in the original texts of the Old and New Testaments, there is for the most part no equivalent in the Latin Bible. We might therefore expect that a translation made from the Latin Bible would be less accurate in its treatment of the definite article than one made from the Hebrew and Greek. But because the Latin text failed them here, Gregory Martin and his colleagues had recourse to the original text and (so far, at least, as their New Testament work is concerned) their treatment of the definite article is not only more satisfactory than the treatment given to it by earlier English translators, but even more accurate than in the A.V. It occasionally omits the article where the A.V. and earlier versions wrongly insert it, and even more frequently inserts it where the A.V. and earlier versions wrongly omit it.

THE APOCRYPHA

In the Douai Old Testament the books of the Apocrypha are not gathered together in an appendix, as they are in the Protestant versions from Coverdale onwards; they appear in the positions which they have in the Vulgate. The Third and Fourth Books of Esdras, however (which correspond respectively to First and Second Esdras of the English Protestant editions of the Apocrypha),³⁵ are not included among the canonical books of the Old Testament, but printed separately at the end of the Old Testament, along with the Prayer of Manasseh.

ANNOTATIONS

The Douai-Rheims Bible was equipped with a very full apparatus of annotations. Some of these were intended to clear up difficulties of a non-theological character, but the main purpose of the annotations was to interpret the sacred text in conformity with the faith as the editors understood it, more particularly in conformity with the pronouncements of the Council of Trent, and to rebut the arguments of the Reformers. They are as controversial and outspoken as Tyndale and Geneva at their raciest, and taken together they constitute, as Father Hugh Pope puts it, “a veritable catechism of Christian doctrine such as must have proved invaluable at a time when the Catholic body was for the most part deprived of pastors, and which to this day is most useful for those seeking a detailed knowledge of their religion.”³⁶ They were apparently not the work of Gregory Martin himself, but of William Allen and some others. The last annotation, on the words “Come, Lord Jesus” in the second-last verse of the New Testament, strikes a sympathetic chord in the heart of any Christian reader:

And now, O Lord Jesus Christ, most just and merciful, we thy poor creatures that are so afflicted for confession and defence of the holy Catholic and Apostolic truth, contained in this thy sacred book, and in the infallible doctrine of thy dearest spouse our mother the Church, we cry also unto thy Majesty with tenderness of our hearts unspeakable: Come Lord Jesus Quickly, and judge betwixt us and our adversaries, and in the mean time give patience, comfort, and constancy to all that suffer for thy name, and trust in thee. O Lord God, our only helper and protector, tarry not long. Amen.

One could well imagine the Marian exiles who prepared the Geneva Bible praying the same prayer, with but little modification of the language. Even if Christ is preached in contention, said Paul, it matters little, so long as He is preached;³⁷ even if the Bible be translated in contention, we may say, it matters little, so long as it is translated.

BISHOP CHALLONER'S REVISION

From time to time after 1610 the Douai-Rheims Bible received some slight revision, but the radical revision which has left its mark on all subsequent editions is the work of Bishop Richard Challoner (1691-1781), Vicar Apostolic of the London District. By the middle of the eighteenth century the language of Douai-Rheims was largely unintelligible to the rank and file of English-speaking Roman Catholics, and Challoner's aim was to revise it in such a way that they could read and understand it with ease. The fifth edition of the Rheims New Testament (1738) was probably issued under his editorship, but he saw that it was not simply editing, but revising, that the version demanded if it were to serve its proper purpose. Accordingly he published five successive revisions of the New Testament, between 1749 and 1772, and two of the Old Testament, in 1750 and 1763.

Challoner was a convert from Protestantism, as was also Francis Blyth, Vicar Provincial of the English Carmelites, who collaborated with him in his work of revision. Both men were familiar from their earliest days with the language of the A.V., and it is therefore not surprising that the language of the A.V. exercised a profound influence on their revision of Douai-Rheims. The ecclesiastical terms have been retained: our Lord and His forerunner still call upon their hearers to “do penance” and Christians are still exhorted to pray for their “supersubstantial” bread; “the parasceve of the pasch” (John 19:14) has not yet become Passover Eve. But Christ is now said to have “emptied himself” in Phil. 2:7 instead of “exinanited himself”; the “azymes” remain in Acts 12:3 but are changed into “unleavened bread” in Mark 14:12 and Luke 22:1; the “scenopegia” of John 7:2 becomes intelligible as the “feast of tabernacles”. Rhoda is no longer a wench, but a damsel. It is, however, even more in the cadences of the language than in the vocabulary that the influence of the A.V. is most clearly to be recognized, by anyone who will take the trouble to compare the old Douai-Rheims Bible with Challoner's revision.

We have already quoted the opening paragraph of Hebrews in the Rheims version; it follows the word-order of the Latin (and, through Latin, of the Greek) as it begins: “Diversely and in many waies …”. But here is the same paragraph in Challoner's revision:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high, being made so much better than the Angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they.

No need to ask what influence has brought about so marked a change from the Rheims wording!

Here is how Challoner deals with the excessively latinate passage quoted above from the Rheims version of Eph. 3:8-13:

To me, the least of all the saints, is given this grace, to preach among the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to enlighten all men, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God who created all things: that the manifold wisdom of God may be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places through the church, according to the eternal purpose, which he made in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him. Wherefore I pray you not to faint at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.

The Douai-Rheims-Challoner Bible was authorized for use by the English-speaking Roman Catholics of America in 1810.

In Challoner's revision the ample annotations of the old Douai-Rheims Bible were severely pruned; readers who examine the footnotes in an ordinary edition of Douai-Rheims-Challoner to-day see but a shadow of the original. “The glory,” says Knox, “has departed.”³⁸ Even so, some of the notes that were included in editions early in the nineteenth century were sufficiently forthright in their anti-Protestant vigour to cause considerable embarrassment to the Roman Catholic bishops of Ireland during the Catholic Emancipation campaign.

Three private ventures in Bible translation from the Hebrew or Greek by Roman Catholic scholars deserve to be mentioned. In 1792 Alexander Geddes, a critic of exceptionally liberal mind for his day, issued the first volume (Genesis-Joshua) of The Holy Bible … translated from corrected texts of the originals, followed in 1797 by Judges-2 Chronicles and Prayer of Manasseh and in 1807 posthumously by the Psalter. About a century later F. A. Spencer published The Four Gospels, a new translation from the Greek direct with reference to the Vulgate and the ancient Syriac (New York, 1898), which was followed by the posthumously published version of The New Testament (New York, 1937). The New Testament rendered from the Original Greek with Explanatory Notes, by J. A. Kleist and J. L. Lilly, was issued at Milwaukee in 1954. But the story of Roman Catholic Bible translation in our own generation remains to be told in Chapter XV.

Notes

1. The Bible in its Ancient and English Versions, ed. H. W. Robinson (Oxford, 1940), p. 160.

2. The doxology is absent from the best Greek MSS. and the Latin Vulgate, but it appears in the majority of later Greek MSS.

3. C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford, 1948), p. 122.

4. No student of Tyndale's life and work can afford to neglect J. F. Mozley's excellent study, William Tyndale (London, 1937).

5. Elizabeth's sister Agnes married a Scots scholar named John Macalpine, who regularly latinizes his surname as Maccabaeus. He became Professor of Divinity at Copenhagen in 1542 and was one of the translators of the Danish Bible. This helps to explain the Danish king's exertions on Coverdale's behalf.

6. This story, for which we are indebted to William Fulke's Defence of the Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue (London, 1583) is often thought to refer to the Great Bible of 1539; but see J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bible (London, 1953), pp. 112-114.

7. That is, base no doctrines upon them.

8. Our 1 Kings is called 3 Kings in Coverdale's Bible (following the Latin Vulgate). The prayer of Solomon at the dedication of the temple (1 Kings 8:23-53) was sometimes included as a separate document, over and above its occurrence in the proper context.

9. That is, the Vulgate (as contrasted with the newer Latin texts such as those of Erasmus, Beza, Pagninus and Castalio).

10. Theodotion's translation of Daniel into Greek is the text of Daniel which usually appears in the Septuagint. In the Septuagint the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Holy Children come between verses 23 and 24 of Daniel 3.

11. Both these renderings are preserved in the Prayer Book Psalter, based on the Great Bible. See pp. 81 f.

12. Tyndale's New Testament had been printed the previous year by a London printer named Thomas Godfray.

13. J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and his Bibles, p. 141.

14. That is to say, “with exclusive right of printing it”.

15. Thus it is to Tyndale (via Matthew's Bible) that the A.V. of this verse owes the “still small voice”.

16. Polydore Vergil was an Italian humanist; it was his Latin treatise On Inventors of Things (1499) that Langley abridged in English.

17. D. E. W. Harrison, The Book of Common Prayer (London, 1946), p. 61.

18. Note the inadvertent omission of the clause: “neither doth any man know the Father but the Son”.

19. Coverdale and his Bibles, p. 296.

20. Whittingham took this verse-division over from the fourth edition of Robert Estienne's Greek New Testament (Geneva, 1551).

21. None was printed in England before 1575.

22. For its appearance in another fourteenth-century work, see p. 10.

23. They all became bishops in due course.

24. If the translators appear here to be guilty of unseemly self-commendation, let it be remembered that these words are actually the words of Miles Smith speaking of his colleagues.

25. Cf. Lane Cooper, Certain Rhythms in the English Bible (Cornell University Press, 1952).

26. I have a Cambridge edition of the A.V. dated 1630 which lacks the Apocrypha, but this too is a matter of binding, since the O.T. ends on p. 590 and the N.T. starts on p. 731. There is some evidence, however, that the volume has been rebound.

27. The last edition of the Geneva Bible appeared in 1644.

28. The first Bible printed in America was John Eliot's Algonquin version published at Cambridge, Massachusetts—the N.T. in 1661, followed by the O.T. in 1663. The first Bible printed in a European language in America was a German Bible published at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1743; it did include the Apocrypha.

29. This new Latin Psalter, prepared by members of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, was published in 1945 and approved by Pope Pius XII for liturgical use as an alternative to the Gallican Psalter.

30. Works of supererogation, in Roman Catholic teaching, are works done over and above what the law of God requires.

31. On Englishing the Bible (London, 1949), p. 47.

32. But there are many instances in Douai-Rheims of Hebrew idioms which Jerome had taken over into the Vulgate.

33. B. F. Westcott, History of the English Bible (London, 1905), p. 253. His list must be scrutinized carefully; some of the words he lists appear in earlier English versions. Thus “concupiscence” (Rom. 7:8), which he says was taken over by A.V. from Rheims, is found in Tyndale and Whittingham.

34. Op. cit., p. 254.

35. First and Second Esdras in Douai (as in the Vulgate) are our Ezra and Nehemiah respectively.

36. H. Pope, English Versions of the Bible (St. Louis and London, 1952), p. 301.

37. Philippians 1:15-18.

38. R. A. Knox, On Englishing the Bible, p. 47.